What Remains of Supremacy
by kujafangirl2
Summary: Khan, a 300 year old genetic Augment, lost everything after his run in with the star ship USS Enterprise. He is now free from cryogenic sleep and on the run. SH-47 is a child Augment created through a confidential Starfleet project and programme whose ship crashes whilst awaiting termination. Eventually, the two meet and superior beings should stick together...
1. Chapter 1

There were so few flames.

That was what startled her the most about the crash site.

The fallen vessel lay grounded and obliterated, burnt corpses and mangled bodies littered around the hard and dusty earth, which had fractured from the impact. A crater hole rested about eight hundred feet north-west where the heavier part of the ship had impacted with the ground and knocked the other sections away from the sheer force.

The majority of the debris was obscured by smoke and dust lifted by a heavy wind, the huge amount of oxygen negatively corresponding to the number of fires around, which were struggling to remain lit and already dying, probably due to a lack of fuel. There was a resounding silence all around.

No screams. No cries and coughs.

Everyone was probably already dead.

SH-47 lay pinned to the earth, her lower body crushed to the floor by the weight of the heavy sheet of metal that had fallen off of the ship's outer plating. It was not much bigger than her in size, but it felt so much bigger. There was a dull but constant pain in her right ankle, which made her grit her teeth from the pain every time she attempted to shift it.

Everyone but her was dead.

She was alive.

She'd survived.

The gears of her brain had slowed and clogged from the initial shock, but they soon started to revolve again and to whir as the realisation fully sunk into her brain. She was alive and everyone else was dead. They couldn't have coped with the current levels of carbon dioxide and toxic gases. She, on the other hand, apparently could.

SH-47 had no idea what was beyond the crash site and if there was any civilised life out there, if there was any water at all on this seemingly barren world. But she wasn't going to find out unless she went and looked.

She just needed to free herself.

Inhaling a deep breath, she lifted her tremulous arms and placed them underneath the sheet. Mentally, she counted to three, then heaved.

There was a sudden and tremendous pressure on her ankle and she clenched her jaw and gnawed her teeth, persisting with lifting the plating and attempting to flip it off of her so that she could stand.

As strong as she was, it was a difficult feat to accomplish. Especially with all the weight shifting on to her suspected broken ankle. The pain should have been a good sign that it was working, that she could flip it off of her.

But it was torturous.

After a minute, she let out a defeated gasp and a cry and let go. It slumped back into its original position as she wheezed and let her arms fall to the ground once more.

She felt ridiculous. She shouldn't be so weak in the face of pain, in the face of adversity! She had been trained to block out the pain and focus on her goals rather than her nerves.

But she had been condemned a failure regardless before. Why should things be any different now?

Wallowing in momentary self-pity, she eventually decided to try again.

She did and focused a lot more of her energy into the task. It was difficult but she made some progress, lifting it further than she had done previously. But it still came crashing down upon her once more when the agony in her leg simply became too much.

Staring ahead at the empty horizon and terrain, SH-47 wondered if anything (or anyone) had even seen the crash. Could anything even survive here? Was this a civilised planet or a lawless and inhospitable one?

Then, she noticed something. She initially had to squint to make sure she could actually see so far away and then realised that she wasn't hallucinating- she could actually see something.

She could see someone coming towards the wreckage.

SH-47 could only make out a humanoid figure coming out of the blurred horizon and approaching the crash site. She couldn't make out any other details but it was definitely a humanoid species. Where they'd come from, she didn't particularly know or care. She wasn't alone and soon she'd be out.

If they decided to help her.

If they decided not to kill her.

The realisation that they might not be a friend to her or maybe even an enemy stung her to the core. What if they were an enemy? What then?

Her gaze roved over to a phaser a resting just out of her reach. She stretched towards it and her fingertips only just brushed the base of the handle even then.

Letting her panic flood her body, SH-47 went back to attempting to move the metal plating off of her body. She had no idea how far away the humanoid was now and didn't dare look- she had to focus all of her attention on freeing herself if she was going to do so.

All the while, it got heavier and the pain increased constantly but she kept pushing and heaving.

_Come on._

_You're nearly there._

_Nearly there…_

The pain reached its climax and she found that she couldn't hold it in anymore and let out a loud a loud scream as the metal plating finally flipped over behind her and off of her mangled leg. Her breathing wracked for a moment afterwards and she gave a weak laugh of triumph- she had actually done it. The instinct of survival had seen her through the struggle and she had done it.

Then she heard it.

Crackling. The sound of movement behind her and the shifting of metal. A low growl.

Slowly turning her head, she saw it.

A monstrous insect-like form towered above her, hundreds of spiny legs running up and down its body where it was not covered by bony carapace. Antenna twitched and moved through the air then pointed in her direction as its mouth pieces.

SH-47 was frozen to the spot, not sure what action to take. Was it going to attack her? Was it carnivorous?

The creature recoiled for a minute, rising into the reddened sky and tens of feet into the air. Then, head first, it ploughed down straight towards her.

She twisted her body as fast as she could and propelled herself towards the phaser, not sure how much good it would do. She wasn't even sure if she had enough time to seize the weapon then turn around and fire it. But she had no other options.

She didn't want to die here.

SH-47 grabbed the phaser and whipped around on to her back, ignoring the agony in her leg as best as she could.

There was a laser blast and the insect reeled backwards, shrieking from the force of the blast, which had knocked it back a good distance.

But SH-47's finger never even pressed down on the trigger.

Shocked, she turned to see a tall male human stride past her, armed with a broken laser turret, which seemed to be the weapon responsible for the blast. She shuffled backwards as best as she could as the man fired again and again, aiming at an area the carapace did not cover, just below the head section.

Within seconds, the monstrosity fell to the ground, dead. The ground quaked as it impacted and a small shockwave of dust blasted into her and the man, who was standing a few feet away from its body. She twitched and tensed as the force ploughed into her for a moment, then wearily watched the man approach the body, seemingly analysing it for any remaining signs of life. Judging from the man's stepping back, she assumed that he had found none.

Then he turned to her, greased and messy dark hair blowing in the wind, pale eyes cold.

SH-47 gulped and shuffled back again, her injured leg dragging along the floor as she went. Phaser still in hand, she raised it slightly in his direction, not sure whether he was friend or foe. His eyes followed her movement, and then roved to the phaser still in her hand.

He moved forwards, slowly, towards her.

"Who are you?" she demanded, though the shakiness of SH-46's voice made it sound more like a plea than a command.

He ignored it regardless, approaching as she struggled to maintain the distance between them.

"Lower your weapon," he instructed icily, his voice low and cold.

She didn't obey, still moving away. He hadn't complied with her request- why should she comply with his? He hadn't shot her, for some reason, though she got the feeling that didn't necessarily mean that he meant her no harm.

After a moment of moving away from him and pointing the phaser at him, his pace quickened and he was upon her. The phaser was snatched from her trembling fingers and thrown away, into the dust. His hands seized her arms and she twisted and tried to yank away from him, exclaiming, "Let me go!" She was surprised by the sheer strength she could feel in his arms against her own, even if she was slightly weakened.

Her arms were forced together in front of her and, in an instant, cuffed together by some arm restraints. Her panic intensified, as did her attempts to free herself from the man's grip. She had no idea what he intended to do but he gathered that she was about to be taken as some sort of hostage or something of the like.

Regardless, she was lifted off of the ground and flung over his shoulder like a bag of feathers; cuffed arms limp before her and only those, his back and the ground visible to her. "What are you—"

"Quiet," her captor interrupted, standing up fully. The ground shrank away and he began to move.

"Put me down…!" she objected, ignoring his demand.

"Be quiet, or I will sedate you." His voice was now hard, and threatening. It made her tremble with a deep and resounding fear and for a moment, she was quiet. She had never felt so helpless in her entire life- bound and carted off like a maimed animal.

She gritted her teeth in anger and from the discomfort in her leg. It throbbed at every step this man took and she had no idea how badly injured it was.

For a minute, they continued in silence, but the confusion and the terror of what could lie in store for her began to consume her rationality. She'd just gotten out of one bad situation only to fall into another one and it was absolutely infuriating.

"Where are you taking me…?" SH-47 murmured, her voice quiet.

"I feel no desire to tell you," was the response, in a warning tone. Clearly, they didn't feel like talking.

"Well, it's your obligation to…! Tell me where you're taking me…!" She ploughed her cuffed fists into his back in annoyance. Then they stopped.

She felt him shift her bodyweight off of his shoulder as he stopped and she heard the rustle of his layered clothing. Afraid of what he had warned her he would do if she made trouble, she commenced fighting back again, even though it was futile. Her body was lowered to the ground and there was a sharp sensation in her upper-arm that made her jump out of shock.

Her vision grew clouded and the scenery melded into one mass of fuzz and blur as her lashes flickered and grew heavier and heavier.

She tried to ask what he had done but no words left her parted lips as she felt herself lifted up once more on to the man's back. As they resumed walking, her eyes finally fluttered shut and all went dark.


	2. Chapter 2

"Temporary ship's log; 18th of the 2nd month, Earth calendar, year 2260. Current time: 23:23."

The man pressed a second button on the room's control panel and a small red light flashed. He had recorded the date in the log and now was ready to add on to his earlier report, which he had filed roughly two hours ago. "Following previous log input, I inspected the crash site previously mentioned. The ship was badly broken and dissembled; almost the entire crew are deceased. Only one survivor remains, whom I have taken into custody.

"Survivor appears to be a human female, approximately 13 earth years of age.

Hair and colour- none, as is shaved.

Eyes- mentally noted prior as blue.

Skin tone- pale."

He paused momentarily as his gaze rested on the said survivor who, lying cuffed to an examination table, stirred ever so slightly from their drug-induced slumber. Their lashes flickered open for a brief second before closing again. He turned his attention back to the log.

"Found in a state of shock with suspected lateral malleolus fracture. Highly uncooperative- sedation was necessary. Apparently is resilient to inhospitable atmosphere and has increased physical capabilities. Also possesses a surprising endurance to sedatives in human doses," he continued. "About to perform examination of subject now.

End log."

The red light flashed off and the man moved away from the console and towards the table and the girl lying atop of it, now groggily coming to. He was surprised at the rate of which she had regained consciousness- it was well beyond that of a regular human or similar race. And he had applied slightly more than the average dose a human was given.

What was she?

He had his suspicions but they could not be confirmed until he commenced the examination.

He reached underneath the table and into an in-built draw, pulling out some of the instruments he would need as well as a pair of transparent plastic gloves, which he pulled on.

Momentarily, he released the clasp on one of the cuffs and allowed one of her hands to slip out before closing it again and moving her on to her back instead of her side. As he did, she let out a faint groan and her eyes half-opened in a squint, looking up at the ship's lighting.

The man took hold of her chin and moved her head, examining the cuts and bumps that had formed from the crash or possibly afterwards. Reaching for a small light, he switched it on and shone a beam into her eyes (which were now largely open), looking for visual impairment of any kind. There was no indication of such impairment- only the enlarged pupils from the sedation were abnormal.

He released her head and his gloved hand moved down to her arms and fingered the bruises that had formed and dyed her body black and blue. He applied some pressure to them, checking that they were merely flesh wounds and had not caused internal bleeding.

"What…are you…doing?"

The man turned his head a fraction and met the girl's confused glance as she looked up at him from her position on the examination table. He didn't respond and turned back to the arm that was cuffed to the table, and then frowned.

Some of the bruising had faded ever so slightly, her blackened wounds partially returning to their faint pink colour. He examined it again and then looked to her head, where one of the minor cuts on her forehead seemed to have already clotted.

Her minor wounds were regenerating at an incredibly fast rate for a normal human.

If she even was a human. Or perhaps she was like…

He turned his attention back to the examinee and addressed her. "What species are you?" he demanded.

The girl regarded him for a moment with uncertainty. "What do you mean…?"

"What species are you?" he repeated with a growing hardness in his voice.

She seemed to notice and her body tensed on the table. "H-human…" she stammered. "Why…?"

She began to glance around her and at her restrained body, the jacket of her uniform removed so she was only in the black cargo pants and a white sleeveless vest. Her right boot had been removed as well, so that her fracture could be better examined.

She began to panic again, he could tell from her increased rate of breathing. "Where am I?"

Once more, he ignored her and reached for a small handheld x-ray device he had pulled out from the draw and switched it on. She tensed even further as he scanned it over her whole body before selecting an option to do a closer one, holding it over her broken ankle.

"Please…don't ignore me."

Finishing the second x-ray, he met her frightened gaze to find her in a sitting position. Her sorrowful eyes begged him for a response and he stared back coldly. The man approached the console and inserted the device into a dock, downloading the x-ray on to the memory bank. As it did so, he turned back to her.

"Are you afraid?" he inquired, approaching the table, his body towering over her.

She gulped, and gave the faintest of nods. "Why didn't you let me die? Why didn't you kill me?"

"For the same reasons that I suspect allowed you to survive," the man answered, removing the plastic gloves and discarding them in a container. "Your immunity to the toxic atmosphere, the speed of your body's recovery to physical injuries, your physical capabilities."

He allowed himself to kneel to her level and look her straight in the eyes. "I share them. I suspect that you and I are more similar than you may think."

A shiver descended down her spine as he asked in the calmest manner, "Are you an Augment?"

He noted as a look of shock appeared on her face and then her expression became troubled. She didn't answer for a minute, seemingly mentally debating over what answer to give him.

"Are you an Augment?" he asked her again.

Slowly, the girl met his intense gaze with one of worry.

"T-there's a file in my inner-left jacket pocket," she answered. "It says what I am in there…"

Immediately, the man stood and strode over to where he had placed her piece of clothing and rummaged around the inside pockets, retrieving a few scraps of creased and slightly crumpled paper. He unfolded it and examined the information printed out before him.

Her identification (there was no name) was recorded as SH-47. She had been created in the year 2247, for which she had partially been named.

He scanned the document thoroughly and eventually found what he was looking for.

SH-47 was the product of enhanced genetic technology which had increased many of her attributes to make her the perfect soldier.

She was an Augment, though not of the same brand he was.

But she was still an Augment.

Folding the file and inserting it into his trouser pocket, he turned back to her. "SH-47."

"Yes?" Her response was quick, though it sounded fearful.

"I have need of your abilities."

"What for?"

"My ship is not functioning properly and is damaged- it is not capable of flight. I require assistance in repairing it and obtaining the parts needed to do so."

SH-47 pulled her cuffed arm, making the bonding instrument clank against the metal of the examination table, the sound echoing around the room's metallic walls. She wasn't entirely sure about aiding the man who had drugged her and taken her hostage. In fact, she was rather against the idea.

"I will ensure your safety, survival and provide medical attention for your fracture if you comply," the man continued, sensing her distrust. "If you refuse to do so, I will not be as generous. One way or another, I will have your cooperation."

He stared at her and waited for her answer to his offer. Either she would do as he asked and he would keep her alive or he would have to use force.

And he would use force if he needed to.

The second option wasn't necessary as SH-47 gave him a slight nod in response.

Khan had kept true to his word so far. She wasn't sure whether she had expected him to do that or betray her but she wasn't complaining. And she knew his name now, which was something.

He'd begrudgingly told her when he'd been placing a cast around the break about two hours ago, but only once she'd asked. Even then, he'd seemed hesitant to do so, but he had told her anyway.

Presently, SH-47 was still on the examination table. Though her cuffs had been removed and she was now free to move, she chose to remain lying where she was.

She was aware that, due to the fast nature of her body's recovery time, she probably wouldn't be out of commission long but why impede the process? The faster it healed the more use she'd be and the quicker she would be off of this inhospitable world.

Her gaze slowly rested on Khan, who was examining a tablet nearby. He'd left the room a while ago and hadn't returned to her company until recently and with this device, though now that he was there again she noticed that he was seemingly absorbed in what he was doing.

She wasn't quite sure what that consisted of but she observed from afar, having nothing else to do. He tapped the translucent screen a few times and an occasional bleep sounded as he did so.

A few minutes passed before Khan noticed his captive audience and made his way over, and she shuffled up into a sitting position as he did so.

"Where you one of the crew aboard your vessel?" he asked.

She shook her head in response, but she had an idea of what he was getting at. "I'm not a crew member but I know the internal workings," she reasoned. And she did. She'd seen diagrams on the ships monitors in the engineering room as she was initially transported to the brig.

"Then you also know the components."

"Yes."

Khan proceeded to hand her the tablet he had been using and she received it, looking upon the screen to find a list of various ship parts.

"The list is composed of parts which are compatible with this ship that I may need," Khan explained. "Were any present on your ship?"

SH-47 nodded in response and skimmed down the list, which was longer than she expected. Every so often, she would stop and point out the odd component that had been present to him, and he would appear to take a mental note in response and give a curt nod.

"The warp core isn't compatible," she said eventually, handing him back the tablet upon pointing out all the other available components. "Though you might be able to salvage some of the circuitry from it and try to cross-wire your own, if you have one…"

Khan nodded once more in reply and said, "The warp core was sufficiently damaged- it may require more than wiring."

"If you can salvage more than wiring from it, take whatever else you can. Besides, I'm not sure if all of those components are broken, so improvisation might be necessary." She shifted slightly on the table so she could properly address him. "I'm guessing you're going to retrieve them now?"

"You are correct," Khan responded coolly, placing the tablet down upon an available surface. "You will remain here until I have further need of you."

"Will you have further need of me?" SH-47 pursued. She wanted a guarantee of her usefulness. Usefulness meant prolonged survival.

"Yes. Not at present, but I will shortly."

She raised an eyebrow, following Khan's movement around the room towards a storage locker. "With what? My physical capabilities are currently…limited," she reminded him.

The man reached in and pulled out a long, dark coat before slipping it on. It seemed heavy and worn, used to protect him from the elements of dangerous environments like the one they were currently stranded in.

"Wiring," was his blunt reply. "Majorly fusing and welding components into place. You appear capable of such labour, even with your injury."

She almost scoffed at that comment. Of course she was capable! She was superhuman! Perhaps not the strongest or the most intelligent, but she was capable.

She was different, as she'd often been told.

The sound of a clink nearby snapped her back to attention and she glanced to her right, where a glass of water had just been placed on the examination table. She could tell from the transparency and the way the ripples moved inside the glass as Khan set it down.

She turned to him, sending him a questioning glance, as if  
to say _what am I supposed to do with this?_

"It's water. Drink," the man instructed as he headed for the door. He pressed a switch on the control panel and it opened electronically, then he strode out.

Her eyes followed him for a moment and trained them on the door. Then she turned to the glass and picked it up, lifting it towards the artificial lighting. Before drinking it, she had to be sure that it wasn't drugged.

Eyes boring into the liquid, she scrutinized it and saw no hint of leftover particles, no indication of something having been dissolved into it. She shook the glass ever so slightly, sending the contents into a tempest at the motion.

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.

She held the glass to her lips and took grateful sips, almost having forgotten how parched her throat had been. The glass was soon empty and her thirst sated, so she leaned over to a nearby surface and set it down there before moving into a comfortable position on the table and lying back once more, waiting for Khan to return.


	3. Chapter 3

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Wow, I had no idea this story would get so many views! I truly appreciate it, everyone!**

**Okay, so this story took a little longer to upload than expected as I wanted to adhere to the technology used in the original series and stick true to the ship's parts and their layouts as they were shown in the show and the movies, so it's a bit technical. But it's sci-fi, so I think that's okay.**

**Also, we're going to get a glimpse into SH-47's past here. I plan to go into it in more detail in the next chapter, and Khan's later on.**

**Please send reviews- tell me what you like, don't like, what could be improved etc. and I'll try to work on that.**

**Enjoy the chapter, everyone!**

With a cybernetic swoosh, the door opened and Khan re-entered, a large piece of machinery under his arm.

He turned to his companion to find her asleep on her back, eyes peacefully shut. He'd been away for a good few hours, about seven, so he had guessed that she might rest whilst he was gone.

Khan carried on past and walked up to the terminal before setting the part down, sending a loud _thump_ echoing around the room. It had been heavy but his enhanced genetics had made it possible for him to transport it manually.

Apparently, SH-47 was a light sleeper as, upon hearing the noise, she immediately bolted up into sitting position and her head revolved at high speed, looking for who or what was responsible for this racket.

Her vision focused on Khan and his part, which she vaguely recognised from the ship's diagrams.

"You took a long time," she noted.

"I could only move so many pieces at a time," Khan responded coldly, though defensively.

"You had to move them yourself?"

"Yes."

She fell silent and turned her attention to the device he had entered with. "That's from the warp core, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Did you get what you needed?"

"I did," the man replied, seeming neither particularly pleased nor particularly annoyed, as per usual. "Come here."

SH-47 remained where she was for a moment, pondering whether to do as he asked. What did he want her to do? Was he going to hurt her?

Then again, he would probably hurt her if she didn't do as he asked. And he hadn't hurt her.

Yet.

She swivelled her legs around to the edge of the table and slowly lowered herself to the floor, careful as to not injure her leg any further.

Initially, as it touched the ground and the pressure of her bodyweight rested upon it for a moment, she winced but quickly levered the pressure on to her other leg and stood straight.

She made her way over, balancing and steadying herself on nearby surfaces until she stood before him. "Yes?" she queried.

"The core segments of the matter/antimatter reaction assembly are going to be stripped of all un-necessities and transferred. I need you to assist in inserting and securing them into place, then we are going to insert the dilithium articulation frame," he explained.

"You're going to strip them?" she repeated. "What for?"

"Only the bare essentials of the device are needed. Anything else will inhibit how it will fit into the circuit and there is not room for a matter/antimatter reaction assembly core at this size," Khan responded.

She nodded, beginning to understand. This ship must have been smaller than a regular federation ship; therefore the components were designed for a smaller ship to be more efficient- the warp core of the federation vessel she had been on was far too large.

"Did you collect any deuterium and antideuterium?" SH-47 checked. Without those chemicals and their reaction upon contact, the core would not function.

"Yes. They will be inserted into the core at a later time."

"Dilithium?"

"I have dilithium. Focus on the task at hand."

Khan turned to the door for a moment and left the room, returning almost immediately with a container, which he set down next to the device. He opened it and handed the girl a laser tool and picked up one for himself.

"I will instruct you on which wires to cut and components to discard, then we will do the same for the second component," he replied, kneeling down on the floor and readying his tool.

Awkwardly and more clumsily due to her leg, she followed suit, nodding to show that she understood.

He inserted the device into the top section of the hunk of machinery and she watched as he used the laser to cut into the alloy and create an opening. He removed the piece he had just cut out and placed it on the floor, leaning over and scanning the inside parts, mentally figuring out what could be removed.

His companion looked and waited for further instructions.

Finally, he spoke. "Discard the left-most resistor, the second relay to the left and cut the red, purple, green and orange wires," he commanded, setting to work on some of the other removable pieces.

She inserted the laser tool and did as she had been told, removing the said components and wires from the machinery and placing them on the floor and out of the way. Khan appeared to be more focused than she was and finished removing his own pieces a minute before she had.

As SH-47 retracted her tool, Khan set down his own and reached for a larger one in the container, designed more like a saw than the scalpels they had utilised before.

"What are you doing?" SH-47 asked.

Khan placed the laser-charged edge on to the top of the mechanical hunk and began to saw.

"Removing the excess outer plating," he answered, not looking at her and focusing on sawing into the material, which was peeling away like butter from the strength and speed he was slicing into the metal with. "I only require the lower sections of each segment and their essential parts."

The majority of the metal gave way and fell to the flooring with a loud _clank_. Then she saw what he wanted.

The lower section, where the power was produced and stabilised on a regular Starfleet vessel, and the circuitry that they had seen before and stripped down to the bare essentials. His warp core must have been significantly smaller if this was all he could afford to fit into it.

The technology needed was set aside and Khan stood and left the room for the moment, returning later with an identical part, which he set down before retrieving his initial laser tool, beginning to repeat the process.

Again, a section was removed from the top and they cut wires and parts off and away again.

"You seem competent enough to do this without me," SH-47 noted aloud as they did so.

Khan did not respond and reached for the saw tool a second time.

"What do you need me for?" she pursued, glancing at him.

He began to slice into the metal once more. He seemed to be ignoring her again.

"You would have found those parts without me eventually. What are your motives for keeping me alive?" She was growing paranoid, but she wanted to know why Khan wanted her alive. Did he have an ulterior motive?

The metal gave way and slammed to the ground and Khan looked at her, frowning. She went silent in an instant.

"Bring the other core segment and follow me." He man stood and picked the second piece they had pried from the mechanism, waiting for her to do the same.

His brushing off her question annoyed her greatly, but she still obeyed and picked up the components they had initially worked on and followed him, at a slower pace and a limp, out of the room.

She had no idea how long they had been working inside the warp core on the reparations, but she knew that it had been a significant amount of time.

The warp core was where he had initially led her. She hadn't had to walk far as the door had led to a small hall, the reinforced glass door to the warp core to the left.

The small bridge, she guessed, was straight ahead and some storage facilities and the vessel's door to the outside were situated to the right.

Khan had opened the door to the warp core and she had followed him inside once he had reassured her in is cold manner that the radiation levels were not harmful to them.

It had been a small room, hatches containing circuitry decorating the white walls and a cylinder-shaped container dominated the miniscule space. There was enough room inside to contain the two at once, and possible another two persons, though she had expected something much bigger.

This seemed to be more like a shuttle than a ship.

The glass cylinder had been opened and the two identical parts had been placed inside and fused to the top and bottom of the machinery housed inside.

The energy from the reaction would be generated there and it took time to make sure that they were securely in place and fused into place correctly as not to disrupt the flow of energy that would flow through the circuitry.

That task in itself seemed to take ages, and then they'd had to work on the circuitry and inserting the dilithium articulation frame, which had taken even longer.

They initially worked in absolute silence to ensure concentration but, now that the most difficult work was complete, SH-47 felt the want for conversation.

"How were you created?" she asked as she fused one of the wires on a circuit board into place, sitting on the ground so as to be at the correct eye level.

Khan, who was standing as he was working on circuitry located higher up, stopped a moment and stared before him for a moment, seemingly into space.

"Through genetic engineering and superior breeding," was the response.

"Did Starfleet create you?"

Khan stiffened and lines appeared on his furrowed brow, indicating anger. "I came before Starfleet," he said sourly, a spark shrieking as the heat fused into the circuit board and secured a particular cable into place. "My creation was decades, centuries before Starfleet even came into existence."

She gazed at him for a moment, unsure why his attitude had suddenly turned so negative. He clearly had no like for Starfleet, but why? Not that she blamed him- they weren't perfect- but she was still curious.

He probably wouldn't even tell her anyway.

"Who named you?" SH-47 queried casually.

"My creator."

"They gave you a name themselves?"

"Yes."

She turned back to the circuitry before her, her face softened. "Oh."

She heard the hatch that contained the circuitry Khan was working on close and another, closer to her but on the same level, open.

"I'm jealous," she said aloud.

There was no answer.

"I'm not meant to feel jealousy. And I'm not meant to have a name. You're fortunate. You have an identity. I have a reference number," she rambled, oblivious to his apparent disinterest.

After a moment, she heard him question, "Were there many Augments that your Starfleet programme created?"

"No. I've only ever seen six of my age, and about ten younger ones."

"Were there any others aboard your vessel?"

"No. I was the only one. I was—"

"Scheduled for termination," Khan finished. "Your file mentioned that." He glanced down at her. "What for?"

She cocked an eyebrow.

"Why were you scheduled for termination?"

She thought for a moment. In her opinion, it was because she had a free will. She had a developing identity at the time, a developing idea of what ideals and path she would like to follow. And her creators hadn't liked that. But, if one wanted to be technical…

"I disobeyed an order. They had no need for a disloyal soldier." The last two words were practically spat out, like a snake spits toxic venom.

There was no reply for a minute and eventually, Khan spoke. "You can leave now."

She stared up at the older Augment, confused. "But I'm not finished."

"I will finish. I do not require your assistance for the moment. Return to your rest," Khan instructed in his cold and demanding tone, shutting another of the hatch doors.

Not wanting to incur his wrath, she struggled to her feet and began to hobble away back towards the room she had previously been recuperating in.

She stopped when she heard him speak again.

"You should have an identity."

SH-47 turned her head slowly back to him, not quite certain if she had imagined his somewhat kind statement. She wouldn't have believed he'd said it if Khan hadn't spoken again.

"You should have a name."

The atmosphere remained quiet for a short while, and a little awkward. His face had not altered from its emotionless expression but hers moulded into the faintest smile.

She turned and, standing straighter, headed through the electronic glass doors and out of the warp core, still smiling to herself with the positivity of a glowing star.


	4. Chapter 4

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've been getting a lot of good responses from the last chapter- I'm glad that you all liked it! Also, I've been getting a lot of people anxiously awaiting SH-47 to get a name- wait no longer, people.**

**I put in a few flashbacks (in italics) and the focus is on SH-47 for this chapter. Khan will be getting his time in the limelight again very soon, Cumberbitches, so don't you worry.**

**Hope you all enjoy the chapter- don't be afraid to send me reviews and criticism!**

_"Doctor?"_

_"Yes?"_

_"What's your name?"_

_The doctor turned to the infant, who remained sat straight and perfectly still on the lab table as she reviewed the results of the girl's blood test._

_"Why do you ask?" the doctor replied, her voice calm and soft. She pushed her narrow glasses up the bridge of her nose slightly. A strand of loose dark brown hair fell from her bun and cascaded down the nave of her neck, stuck to her pale skin, and she pried it away and tucked it behind her ear._

_"I'm curious," the child answered. Her expression faltered slightly. "Is that a bad thing?"_

_The doctor shook her head and approached. "No, not at all. Curiosity…it's good. It's good to be curious. Curiosity makes for intelligence." _

_She regarded the shaved-headed infant, who was looking at her in turn with bright eyes._

_"Maria," the doctor said after a moment. "Maria Sheridan."_

_The child mouthed it soundlessly. "It sounds nice. Maria."_

_"Thank you, SH-47." She sat beside the girl and reached for a small scanning device to check her pulse and blood sugar._

_"Who named you?" SH-47 questioned, almost the exact same way that any other five year old girl would pose a question- with innocence and bluntness._

_"My mother."_

_"Do mothers name people, then?"_

_"They can, yes."_

_"Then can you name me?"_

_Doctor Sheridan glanced up at the little Augment abruptly, halting the scan. "Pardon?"_

_"Can you name me? You said I was formed from your egg," SH-47 explained._

_The woman shook her head and sighed. "You're SH-47- you don't need—"_

_"But that's not a name- it's a number. I don't want to be a number," she protested, almost petulantly._

_The doctor seemed taken aback for a moment and she turned away, removing her glasses and rubbing the lids of her eyes. The girl observed her for a moment and noticed that she seemed what she vaguely knew at the time to be sadness._

_"I'll get into trouble if I give you a name," Doctor Sheridan said eventually._

_SH-47 didn't answer and stared down at her feet sombrely._

_She heard the doctor sigh._

_"You can't tell anyone else."_

_She looked up at the doctor hopefully, her eyes wide and a look of excitement beaming on her face. She wouldn't be a number anymore! She wouldn't be able to say but she'd be someone once she had a name!_

_"I promise, I promise," she gabbled quickly._

_The doctor glanced nervously towards the door, eyeing it for a moment, before turning to the girl. "Alright…your name is…"_

SH-47 sat upright as she woke from her slumber, as she had been trained to do. The instinct had been drilled into her from years of tightly controlled routine. Some of it had been easy enough to grasp, some of it hadn't.

Some of it she didn't want to accept.

Like the number.

She hated the number. She didn't want to accept the number. She wanted a name.

Not just something to call herself. Something that others would recognise as her name. Something that gave her character and made her different somehow.

Khan had a name. Why shouldn't she have one? He'd even said that she should possess one.

And, in her dream, she'd remembered what she had very nearly forgotten. She had been given a name, once. By the only person who had ever seemed to care about her during her time as a puppet soldier-in-training for Starfleet's Augment Programme.

She remembered how thrilled she'd felt when she was five years old and had a name. And now that she'd remembered it, it was a nice name.

It was almost humorous to her. Before, she'd constantly worried over Khan's intentions for her and his motives for allowing her to live. Now she was solely focused on acquiring a name.

Perhaps she no longer felt threatened by the older Augment anymore.

_Static ripped through her body and she cried out in agony as it did so. It made her blood boil and jump and her insides shudder. She felt sick, and a tear rolled down her cheek._

_"Who are you?" asked the man next to the electric chair she was situated in, his finger hovering over the switch that sent the electricity soaring through her child's body._

_She answered._

_It was the wrong answer._

_He electrocuted her again and again and she kept seeing Doctor Sheridan's face as she had given her a name- an identity._

_She was gone now, according to the man. Dismissed. She hadn't been allowed to do that._

_Her growth and her mind had apparently been stunted._

_She gritted her teeth and continuously answered his question rebelliously with her name. But every time she did, the more it hurt._

_"Who are you?" the man asked for the thousandth time._

_And then she started to ask that question herself. Names weren't meant to cause this much pain, were they? They weren't supposed to get people killed._

_Name or number…name or number…_

_And, finally, she gave him the answer he wanted to hear._

_"…S…H…47…"_

_Satisfied, the man stepped back from the console and she was freed from the torture device, falling to the floor in a crumple of gasps and sobs. _

_She thought to herself, at that moment, that she didn't want a name anymore. Not if it hurt so much._

_In the coming years, she had begun to forget the name due to the shock. But she never forgot the pain._

_She would never let that and her growing hatred of these people go._

It had been two days since she and Khan had worked together on repairing the warp core. It was now fully functional but other areas of the shuttle- as she had now discovered it was- were still in need of maintenance and attention.

Her ankle, though still not fully recovered, no longer caused her much pain. A recent x-ray had shown that, thanks to her heightened regeneration speed as an Augment, the fracture was steadily mending and the bone inserting itself into the proper place.

It would be fully healed in just less than a week, Khan had predicted.

As she stood, she noticed that the said man was nowhere in sight. She wondered where he was until she heard the distant sound of a welder.

Already working on something or the other without her. It struck her as odd that he made sure that she had time to rest whilst he carried on working and hardly ever seemed to rest himself.

SH-47 wandered to the door and it slid open. As soon as she stepped into the small hallway she saw Khan fixing a ceiling panel into place, tall enough to fit the metallic plate into the ceiling without need of anything to increase his height. He was tall enough.

He seemed to notice that she was there and available to help so Khan turned towards the outer door and said, "Follow me."

She did, making her way over and through the door out into the dusty environment beyond steel doors and into the wind. Khan's hair blew about from the blustery gusts and he knelt towards a severe break in the outer-plating, which revealed a mass of broken components and wires.

He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small but intense light, which she instinctively switched on and held steadily so that it shone into the mashed interior workings.

The Augment nodded slightly in approval and inspected inside, looking over the damage and examining what was possible to repair.

As he retracted his arm and stood back, she switched off the light source. "Khan?"

"What?" He was already searching for a pair of pliers within the tool container, which he'd placed near the door.

She swallowed and spoke hesitantly in response. "You said before…you thought I should have a name…"

Khan found what he was looking for and removed it from the container, standing up straight so that he extended to his true height and stood above her. He stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

"Well, someone…someone gave me a name once…I wondered if you could…could acknowledge it?" she stammered.

"Acknowledge it?"

"I-I mean, other people might not choose to use it. They might just carry on calling me…SH-47. I don't want to be a number anymore…"

She cleared her throat and met his gaze. "I want to know if…if you'll use this name I remembered…"

The man kept his gaze upon her as hers rove downwards to examine the dust blowing about her feet.

She didn't want to face him- she felt too uncomfortable about the situation.

If a fellow Augment could accept her name, then she felt like everyone else would. Only one person had ever accepted it, and that was the woman who gave it to her. Even then, it had taken time for her to grow to accept it and to use it when actually referring to her.

Probably because she was not meant to have a name.

She still wasn't. But she was free of Starfleet now. The shackles had been removed as soon as the ship had fallen from the stars and shattered into oblivion. She was no longer bound to a single fate and she wanted a symbol that reinforced that fact.

She nervously awaited Khan's response.

After a moment, he asked, "What is the name?"

She told him.

He listened and appeared to mull it over for a while, and then he turned wordlessly back to the damaged section of the ship's plating.

Her heart sank, feeling that his silence was the same as a negative response.

He hadn't accepted it. Why should anyone else?

She would always be a number.

"Tarah, light," Khan commanded, peering into the broken circuitry and not turning around.

She blinked and raised her head, looking at his back.

He'd used it.

He'd called her by her name.

She remained in a state of disbelief for a moment and then immediately turned to the light, switching it on and shining it into the section so that he could better see what he was doing.

He gave a satisfied nod once more and leaned into the gap, moving the wiring and pulling out segments of debris that had gotten stuck in the engineering.

As he worked, Tarah smiled to herself, holding back tears of relief as she held up the light.

She was someone now.

For the first time in eight years, she was Tarah again.


	5. Chapter 5

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: As I'm publishing this, Benedict Cumberbatch is about to appear on the Graham Norton show and I can't wait. As always, I'm pleased the last chapter was received so positively. I hope that you all like this new one and please continue to review and criticise my work.**

**Thank you all!**

Khan had noticed that ever since SH-47 had re-christened herself with the name Tarah, she was surprisingly content. Despite being injured, stranded with a stranger and on an inhospitable world, she could have even been called happy.

Perhaps this situation was better than her previous one.

He knew from conversing with her and through her file that she had been part of a strict regime of Augments designed for combat.

Seemingly, it was a top-secret Starfleet project, similar to how Marcus had forced him to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. He certainly was no friend to Starfleet during that project, and Tarah apparently hadn't been either.

"We were trained solely for combat roles," she had told him once. "Starfleet wanted strong soldiers. They didn't want soldiers who liked to think, so they raised us with that in mind."

According to Tarah, she had been designed and trained to be a scout- to transport messages and occasionally perform reconnaissance, if necessary. Her main prowess was her speed and stamina. Unlike some other Augments in her programme, Tarah was able to read in order to memorise messages if their physical record was destroyed during transportation, which was aided with her well-working memory.

Like all the others, she did have combat training- both with firearms and hand-to-hand combat techniques, though she wasn't created with combat solely in mind, therefor she wasn't as strong at it as some other Augments.

Once, she'd asked him what he had been designed to do. It almost amused him.

"Everything," Khan had answered simply. "My purpose was to prevent war through autocracy- to do so I had to be superior to the human race in every aspect."

That was roughly all Tarah knew about him, beside that he was no ally to Starfleet. Everything else was confined to Khan's own knowledge and his alone.

At present, the ship's repairs were very nearly complete. The warp core, the engines, and the stabilisers- they were all up and running and soon the shuttle would be fully capable of flight in a very short period of time.

He was thankful for that. When working with the younger Augment on the final pieces, he had to wonder what she was going to do when the ship was repaired.

He doubted that she would want to stay, but would she follow him around until he told her to leave? Was there someone to whom she could go?

He did not bring up the matter or specifically voice it. She had been asking again why she had been needed to help him with the repairs and he, for the first time, decided to give her an answer.

"My resources were limited," Khan said bluntly.

"Limited?"

"The time taken to repair this vessel would outrun the elapse of the sustenance and the water by a significant period."

"So you needed me to repair the shuttle so that you wouldn't run out of supplies and die?"

"That is correct."

She had gone silent, with a brief nod, as he had wrenched the final joint into place.

He stood back and stared up at the shuttle, a sense of relief washing over him. Finally, the reparations were complete. He could leave this world now. He could avenge his fallen comrades once and for all.

"What now?" came Tarah's voice.

Khan turned to the girl, her bruises and cuts fully gone, her cast removed with only the slight limp giving away the fact that her ankle had been broken. She'd changed since he'd first seen her, greatly, from a state of vulnerability to a strengthened one.

He knew what she meant. She wanted to know what he would do now- what he would do with her.

"I will go to Earth and have my vengeance," he answered, heading towards the door leading inside the shuttle. He could feel his blood already boiling from the rage buried deep inside of him.

Kati, Otto, Rodriguez, Ling… he would avenge them.

Starfleet would burn, just as they had.

"…am I coming?"

He turned back to the girl, who had just spoken. She stood, unmoving and alone in the wind which billowed in to her and blew about her thin vest.

"Do you want to?" Khan questioned. If she had been human, he would have left her there, for certain. But she was an Augment, like him. In a way, they could be classed as kin.

He knew what it was like to be manipulated and controlled by Starfleet. He knew what it was like to face death.

Tarah nodded, expression nervous. She was probably afraid that he would leave her behind to die.

"Then come aboard."

Khan strode once more towards the door and marched inside. He could hear the younger girl's footsteps behind him at a hurried pace, attempting to keep up with him.

Leading the way to what could be classed as a miniscule bridge, or pilot's section, Khan placed himself in one of the two chairs in front of the console and the front glass visor. He waited a moment for Tarah to take the other before utilising the controls, preparing to ignite the booster jets located outside the craft. He glanced at his companion, who met his gaze, concern visible in her eyes. Concern that the ship wouldn't start after all the effort they had gone through to repair it.

He strapped himself in, and she followed his example.

Exhaling, he powered the engine.

The whole vessel shuddered but remained vibrating with power and stability, as he had expected. The thrusters blasted out flame and fire and the force was tremendous.

The force was enough to lift the shuttle into the air and, with Khan's careful piloting, soaring through the atmosphere and into space.

They shuttle was now at warp once again, on a direct route to Earth. Due to the distance away of the planet they had just left, they would arrive within the hour.

They had to initially break out of warp in order to make it through the debris field Khan had collided with whilst fleeing the Starfleet vessel his cryo-tube had been transported on had been traversed and without difficulty- perhaps because there were two people on board to keep an eye out for an approaching objects that could cause a collision.

"Was that how you crashed?" Tarah asked once they were clear of the field.

"Yes."

He had initiated warp again and set the course, switching the controls from manual to autopilot and fully facing her. "Tell me, what are your plans?"

She blinked in response, initially not answering. "My…plans?" Tarah murmured.

"Your plans," Khan repeated. "You cannot return to Starfleet. What are your options?"

"I-I never planned to return there!" she exclaimed, a look of horror appearing on her pale face. But he did have a point. "But…" Her voice softened and she stared into the vacuum beyond the reinforced glass. "… I don't know…I've not been to Earth before."

Khan raised an eyebrow.

"I was situated on a colony planet."

"So you have no contacts?"

"No." She glanced at him nervously, unsure what to say. She didn't know anyone who would be willing to help her. The only people she knew besides Khan were the people who had indoctrinated and controlled her.

And she had no intention of returning to them.

Khan remained quiet, keeping his gaze on her. He had expected as much.

"We share a common enemy," he said eventually, their pale eyes meeting. "Those who dared to control you, to change you and mould you into something that is beneath your race, as they dared to manipulate and control me."

Tarah did not speak, listening intently.

"I intend to wage war on this very enemy," Khan continued. "On those who have committed crimes that I cannot forgive. If you are going to remain with me, then you must be aware of this. And you must have no qualms with my doing so."

The girl shook her head in response. "What will you do?"

"I will see Starfleet burn," he practically hissed, feeling his blood boil like the eruption of flame that had incinerated his crew. "Once I deem it safe enough to do so, I will act."

Tarah raised an eyebrow slightly, a look of confusion appearing on her face. "Safe enough?"

"My activity has not gone unnoticed. I will be hunted relentlessly for a period of time so it is wise to remain hidden until this attention passes," Khan explained.

"You're going into hiding, then," Tarah summed up, now seemingly understanding.

"Yes. We are going into hiding."

"Is it difficult to hide on Earth?"

For a moment, Khan did not answer. It had been when he had merely been John Harrison, when he had not yet caused what destruction and damage and death he was now known there for. Now, in a world where almost every Starfleet officer knew his name, it would be significantly harder to remain isolated.

There was no reason to lie to the girl.

"It is more difficult than it used to be, but it is possible," he acknowledged. He caught her concerned expression through the corner of his eye, but it was not his place to give her false hope.

"Though it is impossible to ever be safe living such a life."

He turned back to the console, taking full control of the shuttle once more.

Tarah could only shiver tremulously as she awaited their arrival- from both fear and anticipation.


	6. Chapter 6

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Alright, last chapter, I wasn't feeling too great about it. It felt like a bit of filler to me. Now that the story's moving to earth, the passion's coming back and I feel that the story's getting exciting again.**

**As I said, the story's moving back to earth. Time for fugitive action, you** **adventure lovers!**

**Don't forget to review and tell me what you liked and what could be better. Besides that, you all enjoy the chapter!**

Before arriving to the famed planet herself, Tarah had no idea what to imagine of it or what to expect. It was the homeland of the human race; the central, most diverse planet of apparent intelligent life in the galaxy.

Would it be anything like the colony planet that she had been stationed on all her life? With its two moons and violet sky constantly visible? Would it be a place of nature where life grew unlimited, without boundaries? Or would Earth be a land of iron and fumes, a solely industrial world?

Perhaps it would be a conflict between the two.

When the shuttle finally dropped out of warp, she saw what she had eagerly been waiting to set her eyes on.

A large sphere of blue and green and oranges and whites- a world with variety, of land, sea, rock, cloud.

She was not yet able to appreciate the concept of beauty, but if she could, she would have found this new planet before her exactly that.

It impressed her nonetheless.

The shuttle suddenly turned at an angle. Khan was still at the controls and heading towards the planet before them, zoning in on a particular location, located near the blue of an ocean and a mass of land- a small island.

"Destination: Bristol, England," sounded the computer's electronic voice.

Unlike the colony planet, Earth appeared to have a complex national structure.

Whilst the colony planet merely had provinces (three of which were under Starfleet's control and two were under control of native nationalists, who were rebelling whenever they could), Earth was divided into continents and countries, and even those smaller countries were sometimes divided into states.

National identity was nowhere near as simple as the kind she was aware of- Earth was already beginning to confuse her. And the sheer number of countries was overwhelming- hundreds and hundreds of countries. And she knew none of them.

Perhaps she would learn, if time allowed her the luxury.

Khan had had to use caution when landing the craft- as this England seemed swarming with stellar security watching and monitoring the skies and what crafts came and went. Each country had a fairly restricted airspace, he had told her, so he planned to bring the ship down in the middle of the ocean, where it would then fly at a few thousand feet to a way off of their destination, changing altitude when necessary.

Tarah hadn't argued. She could tell that Khan knew what he was doing.

The atmosphere had changed from black to violet to blue as they descended until they hovered and sped across the sea, the waves small and the water brightly reflecting the sun and the sky above. Earth's sky was blue, she now knew. It was a meagre thing to notice, she knew, but everything here was probably new to her, she expected.

For a while, the ship traversed the waves until land was visible. Then the pilot turned to her. "As soon as we land, we will need to evacuate the ship. The identification number will be recognised by the authorities and they will investigate immediately," Khan said, his expression set in a serious look, as usual.

Tarah instinctively nodded. "Will you be recognised?" she questioned quietly.

"Not if I hide my features. There are clothes that do so in the storage locker in the back room- bring them here."

She rose and obeyed, heading through the confined hallway and into the room in which she had spent her time resting and where she had initially come to on the ship.

It felt like an eternity ago.

She made her way to the storage locker mentioned and pulled out what she deemed would be the most concealing for Khan to wear- a long, grey coat with a high collar.

Were Earth's people well groomed? Would they notice her and Khan's scruffy appearance?

Perhaps she should…

Her train of thought was interrupted as she heard Khan's footsteps approaching from the hallway behind her. She turned, pulling out the coat as he entered. The ship was probably on autopilot for the moment.

"I was about to bring them…"

"I will need to change and attend to my hygiene and appearance. I advise you to do the same."

The older Augment received the coat from her and leaned in himself, retrieving a pair of dark trousers and a black V-neck. She took a step back and was immediately passed a dark long-sleeved shirt, a black hooded jacket and pair of trousers with a belt, which were all noticeably smaller than Khan's own garments.

He moved to a corner of the room and stood a moment, before turning to where she stood, on the other side of the room. "Turn around and change," Khan said flatly.

Tarah did so, slightly nervous. She was aware of the concept of privacy and there was little chance of getting it aboard the shuttle, though Khan seemed determined to uphold it.

She didn't blame him- she wanted privacy, as well.

The clothes, stained with dust and sweat, were peeled off of her body and fell in a heap to the floor. The new ones were tugged on and fastened- they were all a little too large, but she didn't particularly mind, as she was only slightly short of the size of a fully grown woman anyway.

Soon, she heard Khan's footsteps stride across the floor, so she turned as she finished fastening her trouser belt as tightly as she possibly could. Now wearing all of his new clothes (save for his coat), Khan walked over to a water container and turned the tap, collecting a handful before shutting off the water flow, then splashing the liquid into his face, washing away the dirt and oils that had gathered there from his work on the repairs over the past few days.

Once his face was now its pale and natural tone and the dirt gone, he ran his soaked hand over his hair, pushing back the messed locks and grooming them back, his forehead now fully visible and his hair straight, slicked back. He moved back to the storage locker, probably to look for something to keep it that way.

Tarah followed his example, cleaning her face and hands, though she had hardly any hair to neaten. Drying herself with a nearby cloth, she turned to her left to see Khan, now with his hair gelled and in his coat, holding something out to her.

"Put it on."

She took the material, which appeared to be a plain black hat. "What for?"

"It will be easier for you to blend in."

She did so, the fabric pressing against her scalp and a sense of warmth gathering atop her head. She stood straight and, as Khan made his way to the console and tampered with it for a moment, extracting what she assumed was his ship's log and deleting any other data.

He was getting rid of any evidence.

Their old clothes, stained with their DNA, were also evidence.

Tarah picked them off of the floor hurriedly and reached into the storage locker for a bag, stuffing them inside once she had done so. When the chance arose, she would destroy them. Khan glanced at her as she did, the hint of a smile of approval forming in the corner of his mouth. She was learning quickly.

Minutes later, the ship was stripped of all of its records and evidence relating itself to Khan and his accomplice and was set on a collision course to a more rural area outside of the city. It was to be destroyed so that it would be more difficult to identify, increasing the chances of a head start against their pursuers, whom Khan had no doubt would be after them sooner or later.

With the ship's collision imminent in less than a minute, the two quickly headed to the airlock door and opened it.

"Michael, Janine, so help me, I will turn this car around!" the man at the wheel blustered aloud to his two squabbling kids strapped in the back seat. His wife, Miranda, wearily stared out her window, situated to the left, out of exhaustion and also guilt.

It had been her suggestion for them to take a weekend break, after all. Leave it to her to drag her family out of their normal routine and spoil the weekend, her husband Richard would say.

Next time, she just wouldn't bother.

As she stared out at the country lane, trees, fields and the bright blue sky, which was unusual for late September, she couldn't help but notice it.

Something was flying towards them at high speed. At first, from a distance, it had looked like a bird but, the more she looked, the more it was shaped like a kind of vehicle.

"Richard…" she started, her eyes widening as she began to realise that this vehicle was losing altitude and constantly coming closer.

"What?!" he snapped, turning to her. Then he saw the ship out of her window, and his jaw dropped.

The vehicle rocketed overhead and the car was almost lifted from just above the road and into the air from the speed and velocity it projected. Miranda and the kids screamed out and Richard cussed, eyes wide, as it just missed them and ploughed into the field next to the road in a ball of fire.

All eyes were focused on the inferno before them so they didn't even notice that, in the field on the other side of the road, two people had fallen from the sky and on to the grass in a heap.

The father slammed his foot on the breaks. "Wait here!"

"But, dad—"

"No, wait! W-wait, just wait!" Richard shouted at them all, trying to follow his instincts as the family man and protector as best he could. He sprang out of the car and jogged to the hedge, hopping over it and towards the wreckage before them, to examine the damage and see if anyone in the chaos was alive.

Miranda watched as he did so, her hands over her mouth. God, were there any survivors? She doubted it but she prayed for a miracle that maybe there was at least one pour soul who'd made it, despite how bad it was.

She jumped when she saw two people- a man and a young girl- run on to the road. They too stared at the crash site in horror. The man, whose gelled hair was slightly dislodged, and whose grey coat was blowing in the wind, turned to her as she pressed the button to open the window. "What happened?!" he exclaimed as the hat-wearing girl with him, probably his daughter, continued to look at the carnage, her expression distraught.

"I-I don't know…it came out of nowhere," Miranda answered, her voice shaking. "God…God…"

"Have you called the police?" the man demanded.

Miranda shook her head and scrambled for her purse, pulling out her phone with shaking hands and starting to dial the number, holding the device to her ear. "Hello, police…?" she croaked.

The man vaulted over the hedge to join the other man. "Can you see anyone?!"

"No, no, it's all fire…Jesus!" Richard responded, holding his hands to his temples in despair. "I was just driving…did you see—"

The newcomer nodded, glancing back to the girl, who was still looking at the wreckage from the road. "We were just…we were sightseeing…it came out of nowhere," he said, running a hand through his dark hair, his voice panicked and in shock. "Your wife's just phoned the police…"

"Right…I…we're going to stay here…" Richard said. "Explain what happened…"

The other man nodded. "I-I can't let my daughter stay here…it'll trigger bad memories…but we'll get to our car down the road and I'll head to the nearest police station as soon as I can…" he said, constantly looking back to her. Miranda was speaking with her and the girl seemed distressed about the whole affair.

Richard nodded and the man ran back to the road and re-joined the girl, pulling her along down the road. He turned back to the fire before him and whispered again, "_Jesus_…!"

No-one noticed the two as, after walking down the road to the nearest bend, towards where their car was supposedly parked, they broke off into a run.


	7. Chapter 7

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** **After a night's sleep, I came down, turned on the laptop and saw that since publishing the last chapter, this story got well over 1,000 views. Thank you all so much for the follows and the reviews, people- I really, truly appreciate it!**

**Well, this chapter may appear a bit bland compared to chapter 6 but I promise the story will pick up again in the next chapter.**

**As always, enjoy the chapter and don't forget to review and criticise.**

The glass felt like ice against Tarah's skin, chilled by the night air outside of the vehicle as she rested her head against it for a moment, closing her eyes.

It was soothing and comforting.

Occasionally, when her lashes flickered open, she would see out through the window and into the darkness and the odd illuminations present from the streetlights and buildings that flashed past. It reminded her of how stars shimmered through the deep vastness of space when soaring past aborad a spaceship.

It was nice to not have to run or walk for a change. It was nice to not have to jump out of a falling shuttle again, though it could have been worse. Since there had been some concern over Tarah injuring her leg again, Khan had taken the force of the fall for her, ensuring that she wouldn't be harmed. She highly doubted that her welfare concerned him, but he probably didn't want to care for her needs as an invalid again.

He'd advised her to act shocked about the crash in front of the family and, once they were out of sight and earshot, they had run as fast as they could down the winding country road.

They knew where they were going. Khan had memorised the route they needed to take to get to the city before wiping the ship's records.

They had walked and run (the running was to avoid being seen by the oncoming police and fire engines that were heading to the crash site) for miles and miles- almost a whole day, time wise- until they reached a small town, where Khan had called what was known as a "taxi".

She hadn't been aware of such a vehicle's existence but Khan had explained to her that it was a vehicle that another being drove that you had to pay to ride in.

"What's pay?" she'd asked him, unfamiliar with the concept.

"A useless human concept to envision enrichment," Khan had responded gruffly. He didn't seem to like the idea, which was apparently that if you wanted something, you had to give someone "money" for it. This ranged from material goods to acts which needed to be played out by others- and they presently needed someone to drive them somewhere, requiring payment.

Fortunately, Khan had money so that hadn't been too much of an issue. The issue was making sure that it wouldn't be easy for them to be tracked by the authorities if they were linked to the crash; therefore they had ridden in about five different taxis of various firms for what should have been a simple hour's journey. They had gone into the urban areas and out again, just to confuse their pursuers, if they currently had any.

Finally, when the web of deception had been weaved well enough to catch any flies on their trail, the last taxi's destination matched their final one.

And there they were, Tarah with her head against the cold window and Khan sat straight and upright in his seat beside her, staring out of the front window shield. The driver in the front had stopped trying to make small talk long ago- they hadn't particularly maintained an interesting conversation. He was probably eager to drop them off and get on his way.

The longer they drove, the more frequent the lights were becoming. Buildings took shape and people starting to become a regular sight. Occasionally, a group of people would stagger out of a specific building, a racket of rhythm and tune practically exploding from the structure. They would shriek and laugh and sing and fall over.

Eventually, the cab driver was freed of his intimidating and quiet patrons as the taxi pulled up to a specific street corner. He turned to them expectantly and Khan passed him a paper note wordlessly as Tarah sat up and opened the door, shuffling out with her rucksack so Khan could do the same.

Liberated of his customers, the taxi drove off into the night and mingled with the endless traffic and other vehicles hovering above the road. They watched it do so for a moment, and then Khan turned and began walking down the pavement in a tall stride.

Earth food was not familiar to Tarah. In the instances when she required food, on the Augment programme, it had been simply prepared and contained mainly tasteless, though it had contained proteins, carbohydrates, fibres and sugars, as their developed bodies still needed to have the basic substances found in food.

Earth food was largely different in comparison.

Earth food ranged from healthy foods to unhealthy foods, the latter being the most easily accessed and most popular with the general public, it seemed, from the number of people that were dining in the grubby establishment they were.

Not that there had been much choice. The only dining places available were grubby ones that sold foreign foods.

Perhaps that was why Khan had chosen here to eat. There were so many other restaurants that if someone called the authorities then the people who would arrive wouldn't know which one they were in- the names were all similar and most of them sold the same kinds of food.

That, and the foods served were- though much more degraded to what he had been used to- the kind that he had been served in a time where he was a ruling power on earth; the ruler of Asia and the Middle East, no less.

It gave him the slightest feeling of nostalgia- of a better time of his life.

Though it was nowhere near as tasteful or enjoyable, his rice was familiar of his past diet and that was enough.

Tarah, sat across the table from him on another cheap plastic bench, didn't seem to have the luxury of familiarity but she was eating all the same and without complaint. The only reason they were willing to eat this greasy, cheap food was because they were starving.

The cost might have also been a factor, as it was cheap food and Khan wanted to preserve as much money as possible.

As Khan had mentioned, his resources had been limited when they were stranded, so food had been very scarce. They had been able to survive with what they had but it had required careful rationing and, since they had arrived on earth, they had been famished.

As the girl finished her last forkful of rice, she addressed him. "What now?" she asked as the silver metal clinked against the porcelain plate.

"We find a place to rest," was the simple answer, as Khan did not want to draw to much attention to themselves. His aim was for them to appear as sightseers who, after a long day, had come in for a late meal and they would then leave, appearing to search for a nearby hotel.

Of course, he had no intentions of doing the latter. Any kind of interaction with others was a huge risk to their safety and their affiliation could not be so easily bought- humans were only loyal to each other for three reasons- relationships, morals and money.

And they had none of those bargaining chips on their side. Any authority official could enter a hotel and ask the staff about who they had said they were and where they were going.

He let her know once they left, taking the backstreets so as to avoid the huge crowds of people and their hearing.

"Then where are we going to go?" Tarah questioned, glancing up at him.

He met her gaze, looking behind his shoulder. "Somewhere where it is safe to talk," was Khan's answer.

She took the emphasised hint that it wasn't safe for them to talk in public and followed him the rest of the way in silence.

There were only two visible sources of light in the darkness of the basement of the abandoned apartment building (or court, as that was what apartment buildings were called around here) they currently inhabited- the first was the faint glimmer of streetlight from the small, high window that rested just above the level of the outside pavement.

The second came from a container of crackling fire, burning the fabric Tarah had been carrying in her bag since they had jumped from the falling shuttle. There was very little smoke as the fuel used had been rubbish and papers that had littered the basement.

Being part of a court, it was still a living space, though small. There was a bathroom connected to the main room, which served as the living quarters and bedroom, as well as a small second room, though it seemed too cluttered to be usable unusable. The place wasn't particularly hygienic, either, but they were fugitives, or they soon would be- they couldn't afford to be picky.

Her hat removed, Tarah lay on the couch, absorbing the heat of the flames a few feet away. She stared into space, not quite able to let sleep claim her from all the thoughts going through her enhanced mind. Were they going to be alright? How long were they going to stay in hiding?

What were they going to do once they weren't in hiding?

She looked at Khan for a moment, who was sat across the room on a foldable bed, actively tapping on his tablet device again with his spine in its usual rigid position.

She could only imagine what he had planned.


	8. Chapter 8

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: I cannot believe how many views this story is getting. You all are unbelievable and amazing and I cannot thank you all enough!**

**This is another rather short chapter, compared with the earlier ones, but I hope to change that. Anyway, shorter chapters indicate thrills and excitement, right? I hope I've included enough in this chapter.**

**I hope that you all enjoy chapter 8- don't forget to review and criticise.**

There was silence throughout the basement that was only interrupted from occasional footsteps of passers-by sounding from outside.

Absorbed in the quiet, Tarah lay quietly on the couch that had served as her bed for the past few days, staring up at the paint-peeling ceiling.

Khan had left hours earlier. He hadn't given her explanation or even told her where he was going. He hadn't said how long he was going to be gone, either. All he had told her was, "I will return shortly."

His take on the word "shortly" must have differed from Tarah's, as he had been gone for what felt absolutely ages.

And he'd left her behind. Why? Did he feel that she would compromise his mission, whatever his current objective was?

The idea saddened her. It felt bad to feel incompetent, to feel like you weren't needed. This mission and remaining with the other Augment had provided her with a purpose that had been stripped from her the moment she had been scheduled for termination. To be given another, an alternative, was a blessing.

Then to be left out of it was painful.

She found herself thinking of her past, before the name, before the troubles. When she had known comfort, though small and limited, of someone who had liked, perhaps even cared, for her. Tarah thought of the person who had encouraged her curiosity and praised her for her strengths.

Her biological mother. The woman who had named her.

She'd not seen her for eight years. She'd been discharged for naming her and, apparently, mothering her too much. How had the other scientists on the programme not mothered their own Augments, their own children? Why had she been the exception?

Did Doctor Sheridan still think about her, wherever she was?

Did she miss her?

Suddenly, she heard a door open and quietly close, the teetering of footsteps upon lino nearby. The girl sprung into a sitting position, first expecting it to be Khan.

A sniff of the air made her frown.

It wasn't his scent. Khan had a specific scent and she could tell that it wasn't him.

She couldn't recognise it.

Silently, Tarah slid off of the sofa and made her way towards a wardrobe that rested against the wall, slipping behind it so that anyone who came through the door would not see her.

The door creaked slightly, hinges unoiled, and she heard the faintest sound of a shoe touching the floor.

She held her breath and pressed against the wardrobe, out of view.

For a moment, all she could hear were the quietest of footsteps, her enhanced hearing picking up the direction- they were roving around the room.

Ever so slightly, she turned her head and snuck a look at the intruder.

He was a blonde human male in his late twenties or so, she guessed. His clothes were dark and he wore a black overcoat.

An overcoat that sat atop a Starfleet jersey.

Tarah moved to hide herself again, withdrawing behind the wardrobe once more.

Then her foot collided with the container used to burn their old clothes, a loud _clang_ issuing and reverberating around the basement.

If she knew how to cuss, then she would have done so, for he had heard her and knew where the noise had come from.

She wouldn't go down without a fight, even if Khan had taken the only weapon.

As he reached the wardrobe, she dived between his legs and on to the floor. Before he could realise what was going on, she kicked him in his leg joint- hard.

He cried out and crashed to the ground as she struggled to get up, then rushed to the door.

In a split second, Tarah realised that she couldn't run. She had nowhere to run to and no idea where Khan was. And what if there were more people out there, like this Starfleet officer?

She stopped just short of her previous target, and whipped her head around to glance at her opponent. He had staggered to his feet and was charging at her with immense speed. She barely managed to get out of the way and he collided with the wall. Then she delivered a fierce punch to his abdomen and he cried out.

He lunged for her and grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her across the room and into a heap on the floor, his upper-body strength practically rivalling her own. As he advanced, she kicked him in the groin and he howled in agony as she struggled back to her feet with the few seconds she had.

A delivered kick to his hip followed and jab of the elbow in his face- that caused a snapping noise and blood spurted from his nose. She had been about to punch him again when he caught her whirling fist and twisted it, yanking her off balance towards him.

A hand seized a pressure point at the base of her neck and she screamed out from the searing pain, slowly dragging her hand through the air to try and remove it, gritting her teeth from the pain. She grabbed the hand and squeezed as hard as she could into the flesh and muscle. Her nails drew blood and she heard him gasp and grit his teeth as well- both were locked in a struggle of pain and wills.

Then she heard a loud _crash_ as the door swung open and her attacker was knocked off of his feet and his bloodied hand released her. Tarah fell to the floor and looked up to see the newcomer punch him thrice in his ribs and then lift him and throw him into the wall, sending the attacker crashing to the floor.

A stamp and a crushing noise extinguished his life in a mere moment.

Khan turned slowly to the younger Augment, who was attempting to heave herself to her feet, her breath coming out in hurried gasps. Striding over, he yanked her to her feet by the collar of her shirt. "What did you do?" he barked.

"N-nothing!" she exclaimed, her eyes wide in shock.

"How did he find you?!"

"I don't know…! I didn't do anything, I didn't!"

He glowered into her eyes, brimming with what appeared to be tears, and saw her sincerity before releasing her, an odd feeling washing over him. He recognised it as guilt.

Guilt for taking out his rage on her when she had done nothing- if anything, she had held him off until he could come back instead of jeopardising their security by leaving and looking for him. He realised that and she shied away for a moment, still breathing rapidly in a panic.

"Are you alright?" he asked after a moment, his voice softer.

She didn't answer, trembling.

"Tarah, are you alright?"

This time she met his gaze and nodded once she saw the genuine concern in his face, though she was weary around him. "W-where did you go…?"

"To gather information." He made his way over to the body and examined it. He was tall for a human male, almost his own height, and fairly muscled.

Khan rifled a hand through the man's coat pocket and pulled out a card, showing his identification. As was visible from his black jersey, he was with Starfleet. He was a Commander and of high rank and status within his investigation unit.

After analysing it for a moment, Khan inserted the card back into the deceased's pocket and rose to his feet.

They'd been fast. He and Tarah had only been there for a few days but they had still been tracked down.

His accomplice could have been killed- he doubted it, as she had dealt some clear damage to the man, but if he had arrived any later then she might not have been so fortunate.

Khan turned around, back to the girl and said, "We're leaving."

She gave a silent nod and went to retrieve her hat as Khan gathered the rest of his few belongings and headed towards the door. She hadn't said a word since he'd wrongfully snapped at her and she wasn't feeling particularly forgiving- though she felt more afraid of the man than stubborn towards him. Her fears of the man who had taken her hostage and sedated her upon their initial meeting had begun to return and regroup.

As she tugged her hat on and Khan swung their bag over his shoulder, containing his gathered things, a hand and fingers wrapped around her own, not too tightly or too loosely. She glanced up at the hand's owner in surprise, but he didn't meet her gaze, choosing instead to focus on what was before them.

She gave a quiet sniff, letting the fears begin to subside, and followed him as he led her by the hand through the hallway out into the streets.

For weeks, it continued. The two would move about the country, as covertly and secretly as they tried, only to be tracked down a few days later.

Unlike the first time they had been discovered, they managed to stay a few steps ahead of their pursuers. Khan had not left his companion unattended in such a way again, and he had always been able to figure out when someone was on their way to their location by hacking the nearby surveillance systems.

To remain hidden for a significant amount of time seemed almost impossible. No matter where they went, there would always be Starfleet investigators trailing them. And Khan could not advance his plans with Starfleet constantly chasing him wherever he went.

They couldn't manage as they were currently, without contacts or someone else to help and keep the investigators away, and Khan knew it. But he had no idea who to go to.

He had no-one to go to, and he had presumed that Tarah had no contacts in mind either.

He questioned her about it roughly a month after their primary discovery. If she knew anybody that might cooperate in helping them remain in hiding. Though her list of friends was practically as bare as Khan's, Tarah was surprisingly able to produce a name.

That was when Maria Sheridan's name cropped up.


	9. Chapter 9

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: It's about time that another character was introduced into this story. So far, we've only really met two- Khan and Tarah- so it's time to introduce another of the story's central characters.**

**As always, please let me know what you all think via review- don't be afraid to criticise; I value everyone's input and constantly strive to improve myself.**

It had been one chilly evening in late October when Tarah mentioned her to Khan. They had been sheltering from a hard and heavy downpour in the highest floor of an abandoned office, not being able to have found anywhere else. There could be no light, but they would not be visible from the large windows due to the haze the rain was making.

When on the run, the longest they had ever gone without discovery was about one week. The shortest had been five hours.

It was probably the surveillance. Khan had to leave for various reasons- to gather information (he had no access to the internet at present so he had to either access it from another source or by acquiring the information he wanted by use of another means), to collect food and water…and they seemed to be able to spot him every time.

If he could find a place that could hold them and provide such facilities then this wouldn't be a problem.

But in order to do so, the place said place needed to be habited by someone else, and that someone else had to keep quiet about their whereabouts.

He knew no-one that would commit themselves to their welfare, but it was the best course of action. Sat on the floor across the room, he turned his gaze from the rain outside to the girl, who was looking out in much the same fashion. She was less recognisable now. Locks of curled, waved dark hair had started to grow atop her shaved scalp and head, so the hat had recently been discarded.

"Tarah."

She turned to him slowly and met his gaze, not saying a word but listening.

"I asked you once if you had anyone you could go to on Earth- anyone who would help you."

She nodded, recalling his previous use of the question.

"I must ask it again. Do you know anyone who would consider hiding us?"

The girl remained silent for a moment, watching the steam escape from even the slightest breath of her own breathing. She was thinking.

Did she? No, she didn't. All she knew were the people on the programme but they wouldn't help her even if they were currently on Earth, unless of course they were like Doctor Sheridan.

"Who?"

She glanced up at him as he stood and walked over to her. "Sorry?" she answered, confused.

"You said a name."

"…Doctor Sheridan?"

"Yes. Who are they?"

So Tarah explained to him. Doctor Maria Sheridan had been almost like a guardian during her days in the Augment programme, in charge of her medical and mental welfare. She had been discharged from the programme eight years ago for "meddling with a test-subject's growth and mental capacity" and Tarah hadn't heard from her since.

"She was with Starfleet, then," Khan growled, apparently the idea of being a member of the organization taboo.

"I doubt she ever enjoyed her work much," was Tarah's response. "She never seemed happy. She was always pre-occupied by something and I think it was her work- I think she was mostly happy to leave. I don't think she's a friend to them now."

Khan mulled the idea over for a minute before addressing her again. "Do you know where she is?"

"No. But I think she'll help if we find her."

Maria Sheridan was living in Cambridge, alone in a single house. She was unmarried and mostly unemployed, only working when she was paid by specific employers who wanted her contributions to valuable experiments or research.

They'd found out on the internet in a local library, then they'd left in a hurry before anyone would get suspicious.

Again, Khan was trying the taxi-spaghetti trick. Their route would knot and tangle and appear to be going nowhere and break at many points and lead to a different strand that was much the same- a mess of a route if anyone bothered to look it up. And this time it took even longer- Cambridge was on the other side of the country.

Still, armed with her address, that was where they were going.

But she felt so afraid.

She'd not seen her for eight years. What if she'd forgotten her completely? What if she was holding a grudge against her for getting her discharged? Tarah's head began to flood with more and more worries and she couldn't get rid of them, no matter how much she tried to reason with herself.

Khan seemed to notice her discomfort from the seat beside her and placed his hand atop hers and gave it a squeeze. Khan never truly opened up to anyone, she had come to know. On the rare occasions when he wanted to come across as reassuring and sympathetic, maybe even caring, he would let the recipient know by way of the smallest gestures, mainly holding or squeezing a hand for a moment. But even then, it was rare.

So she knew that he was fairly concerned about going where they were going and how she was feeling. She had been meaning to tell him who Doctor Sheridan actually was in relation to her- she was more than a guardian, someone who had been tasked with looking after her. And this made her all the more nervous.

The taxi driver had seemed to pick up the negativity in the back and glanced at the girl through one of the mirrors, pale and silent.

"She alright?" he asked Khan.

"She'll be fine. We're meeting her mother," Khan had answered, giving the man a look that told an unspoken story, like a domestic dispute or a divorce had taken place. The driver seemed to understand and focused on his driving again.

The scary thing was that Khan hadn't even been lying- that was exactly who they were going to see.

After getting out of the mentioned driver's taxi and waiting for another one, she tugged his sleeve, deciding to let him know.

He turned and looked down at her, expression set in a poker face of unreadable emotion. "What?"

"You said she was my mother."

Khan rolled his eyes for a moment- seemingly disappointed with her apparent gullibility. "It was an excuse," he drawled.

"No, you were right," Tarah gabbled, consciously looking around to make sure that no-one was listening in.

He raised an eyebrow. "What?" he said again, though there was a tone of surprise in his voice.

"She…she donated the egg that was me." She wasn't sure how else to say it, and she wasn't sure what his reaction would be.

Actually, there was hardly any, and she wasn't sure if this relieved her or worried her all the more.

"Oh," was all Khan said.

"Oh?"

"You seem concerned."

"I am concerned!" she hissed, kicking at the pavement below her feet. "Aren't you?"

"No." He glanced down at her, readjusting his coat collar. "I assume this is why you fear meeting with her again."

She didn't answer.

"Because she is your mother and you are concerned that she will not accept you," Khan continued, looking off into the distance.

Tarah shifted uncomfortably in the cool autumn breeze. She didn't want to say it, but he had hit the nail on the head, so to speak. Doctor Sheridan had accepted the Augment child SH-47. She hadn't accepted the renegade Augment Tarah. And it frightened her to think that she could be abandoned by the one person who had remotely cared about her before meeting Khan.

"She named you, didn't she?" Khan asked eventually.

She didn't look up, feeling him turning to look down at her, but she still nodded.

"Then she will accept you." He spoke as if it were a fact rather than a reassurance.

Finally, she met his gaze with wide, afraid eyes. "Will she?" she whispered.

"If she does not, she is a hypocrite- if she was charged with raising you, and then discharged for not doing so _correctly_…" He strained the last word to show how unenthusiastic he was with the concept. "Then your current self is something that she is responsible for the creation of. Not acknowledging you is proof that she that she is no longer the woman you remember."

Tarah glanced up at the man with a perplexed expression, but she understood what he was saying. It reassured her, what he was saying. And he was right.

Ashamed for bothering him over something that could be deemed as so petty and simple, she stared at her feet. "I'm sorry," she mumbled.

He didn't respond but she got the idea that he was alright with it all.

Khan probably just wanted to find somewhere to lie low, and quickly.

Doctor Sheridan's house was red brick and detached, located down a quiet road with hardly any litter or people, neatly contained with grass and trees. It was idyllic, almost, save for the greying sky above them.

For a minute, they merely stood on the pavement and looked at it, even after the taxi had left. It just seemed so rural that it was safe. True, it might be harder to blend as there were so few people about, but there were less prying eyes and hardly any surveillance seemed to be present, which was an improvement.

Eventually, though, they had to make a move.

Khan walked in the front and they walked past the small silver car parked in the driveway and made their way to the front door, a white object with the number _39_ emblazoned on to the front in a kind of metallic material. Khan didn't make a move to reach for the knocker. Instead, he stepped aside and looked at Tarah expectantly with a look that said _go on_.

She swallowed, reached for the silver ornament and knocked four times.

There was silence for a moment, then the sound of hurrying and footsteps from inside the confines of the house. She waited for whoever was inside to reach the door and open it with a growing sense of anxiety and excitement.

When the bolt was unfastened and the door opened, Tarah wordlessly glanced up woman before her, recognising her in an instant. Eight years, and she'd hardly changed at all. She still had her large dark eyes and her dark brown hair and her pale skin. She was still petite and skinny, and this was emphasised by how much Tarah had grown- she'd seemed small to her even at five years old. She wasn't presently wearing any glasses, as she occasionally used to do- perhaps because she had been participating in an activity that didn't require them.

The woman had been about to speak but she looked closer at the girl, her expression one of deep thought and wonder, almost recognition.

Finally, Tarah broke the silence, her voice breaking the thick tension that had descended. "Doctor Sheridan."

The woman must then have fully realised the identity of this visitor. In shock, she began to fall back, her eyes rolling back into her sockets.

Then her thin body hit the hallway floor with a resounding _thump_.


	10. Chapter 10

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: There's been a bit of a break between this chapter and the last chapter, so my apologies for posting it a bit late. I wanted to make sure that it was well laid out and made sense.**

**I've tried to show some of Khan's emotion this time, like the Khan we saw imprisoned on the USS Enterprise. Forgive me if he seems a bit soppy but I think that Khan can get very emotional and upset regarding his crew. **

**Also, I had trouble trying to make Doctor Sheridan likeable and understandable. I hope that she isn't received very negatively- she's not out to hurt Khan or anything, she just wants her estranged little augment baby girl safe.**

**Please let me know what you think in a review- I welcome comments and criticism, if you have any.**

Neither Khan nor Tarah had expected that response from Doctor Sheridan. They had anticipated that she either would have had an emotional outburst or act indifferently to their presence. Her fainting as soon as she opened the door took them completely by surprise.

Tarah had run inside and took Doctor Sheridan by the shoulders, shaking her. "Doctor! Doctor Sheridan, are you alright?"

She'd got no response so Khan effortlessly lifted her off of the hallway floor and carried her into the living room, setting her down on the longer of the two blue fabric sofas as they sat awkwardly on the free one.

"Oh…oh my…" the weakened woman quietly exclaimed after a minute, her eyes flickering open to stare up at the white plaster ceiling. She didn't move otherwise for another minute and, when she did, she could only turn her head to glance at the two visitors, though her attention was mostly focused on the younger one.

"Is that you, SH-47…?"

Tarah twitched at the use of her old reference number, images of her previous lifestyle flashing in her mind. She shifted uncomfortably and the woman seemed to notice this.

"No…no, that's not right. Tarah…yes, that's it…you didn't like to be called by the other before…" She lifted herself into a sitting position slowly, and a gleeful sob sounded. "Thank God, you're alright…!"

The woman was suddenly up in a flash- to another human it would have looked that way but it didn't seem as fast to the Augments- and she flung her arms about the girl and squeezed her into a hug.

For a moment, she tensed in alarm, not sure what to expect. As soon as she registered she was being hugged, it felt slightly awkward. She had been hugged by Doctor Sheridan before, when she was but an infant. Now that she was nearly as tall as Doctor Sheridan was, it felt odd. She was being hugged like a child, yet she wasn't one anymore.

However, she made no move against Doctor Sheridan's gesture and accepted it, leaning into the embrace.

Khan observed the two curiously from his space on the sofa, an eyebrow raised. He did now understand why the woman would be so emotional, thanks to Tarah's earlier admission of how the Doctor was technically her mother, though this seemed to affect the woman more than he thought it would.

"I-I heard about the order for your termination," the Doctor said after a while, her voice shaking. "And I thought…I thought—I'm so glad you got out of it."

The girl and she pulled away from each other and the younger one looked up at her. "I never arrived for the termination," she corrected. "The ship crashed."

She glanced back at Khan, not sure whether she had to introduce him or if he was going to introduce himself.

It seemed that he was going for the latter as he got to his feet and stood at full height, his size commanding attention to be drawn to him. "Doctor Sheridan," he said simply.

The woman turned to this stranger, looked at his face a moment, and then frowned, almost as if she knew him. Perhaps she did.

"You're John Harrison." The words were almost spat and there was a look of clear distrust and dislike on her face.

Tarah turned to the man herself? _John Harrison_?

"John Harrison is an alias," he replied icily. "My name is Khan."

"It doesn't matter what your name is. You slaughtered innocent civilians and stole lives."

A dark look flashed across his face, almost as if he was holding back a primal urge to do something violent. "Lives were stolen from me first," he snarled.

"Tarah, what is he doing with you?"

The girl looked between the two, almost dismayed, as they both turned to her expectantly. They were fighting. Why were they fighting?

And Khan had killed civilians? Had he? She had thought that his grudge was against Starfleet alone- why was he killing people that had nothing to do with them?

"He…he took me to Earth after the ship crashed," she answered timidly, the intense stares she was receiving intimidating her.

The Doctor turned to the Augment, her frown turning into a deep-set scowl. "And I assume you did this out of the goodness of your own heart?" she asked sarcastically.

"Our interests were aligned."

"Are they still aligned?" Doctor Sheridan challenged, standing up to her full height and marching up to him, looking him in the eyes. "The last time I saw Tarah, she didn't particularly want to kill innocent people—"

"The people I seek are far from innocent," Khan interrupted, glowering down at the small woman. "And I know you have not seen your daughter for eight years, eight years where anything could have happened to dramatically alter or otherwise shape her personality."

The woman stepped back, silent. For a moment, she glanced at the girl, who had backed away slightly to the corner of the room, like a frightened child.

Doctor Sheridan once more turned to the Augment. "What have you done to her?" she asked, though her voice had fallen in volume so that it was now like a whisper.

"Nothing. Not yet."

There was silence and the Doctor's eyes grew as wide as saucers, fearful. Again, she glanced at the girl, though Tarah could see that her expression had changed from one of anger to one of terror, but why?

She got the feeling that Khan was almost threatening her, and that it seemed to be working.

"W-what are you even doing here? What do you want?" the woman demanded.

"Shelter and security. That is all," Khan responded, his face set in its usual emotionless expression. "That is all we require."

"And…and if I refuse?"

Slowly, the man's gaze roved to the girl. However, when he spoke, his speech was aimed at Doctor Sheridan. "Take a guess."

The girl sprung towards the door like a tightly coiled spring that had just been released. The man noticed but she shoved past with force she was barely aware she possessed- she had been so lost in the moment- and she fled.

"_Tarah_!" the woman called after her but she continued out and the sound of a door opening and shutting in the next room could be heard.

The two adults remained frozen to the spot.

"Take a guess…" Doctor Sheridan swallowed before steeling her gaze and whipping around, back to Khan. "You're going to kill her if I don't comply! That's what you mean, isn't it?!"

Khan remained in stunned silence.

"_Isn't it_?!" she screeched, and the man almost jumped in response.

"I had no intentions of the sort," he said slowly, his expression now one of surprise. "If you do not comply, we will be found by Starfleet, one way or another, and she will be exterminated. If you call the authorities, take a guess at what her fate will be at _their hands_."

He could almost see the gears of her mind speed up as she now realised his meaning. She stepped back and looked at the door that her daughter had fled out of. "Y-you won't kill her…?"

"No."

"You won't harm her in any way…?" Doctor Sheridan pressed on in desperation.

"I won't," he stated firmly before heading to the door and opening it, going after the girl.

He found her tucked away in a corner of what appeared to be Doctor Sheridan's back-garden, in a small and shaded area secluded by a small group of trees. She was pressed against a fence, her head tucked into her knees as she sat on a patch of slightly overgrown grass. There was a small door-like gate a few feet away, presumably leading to a field, but she hadn't gone through it.

She probably didn't want to run into the unknown with so many people on the lookout for her now that she was associated with him.

After a minute, of heading out to find her, Khan was kneeling and peering through the greenery of a hedge at her hunched figure. He didn't try to go in and retrieve her- it was a relatively small space that she could fit into and he couldn't.

"Why did you run?" he asked firmly.

"Why did you threaten her?" her muffled voice came.

"I did not threaten her. My meaning was wrongly perceived."

She remained silent for a moment. "You tried to make out I'd changed," she said quietly.

He did not respond.

"Just because you two are on bad terms, for whatever reason, you tried to jeopardise one of the only bonds I have. I've not changed…you don't know what I was like, you weren't there…" Finally, she lifted her head, the eyes moist as they regarded him sorrowfully. "…were you?"

He met her saddened look calmly, though he felt something pang in his chest uncomfortably from the way she was looking at him. "I was not," he confirmed.

An awkward silence descended and none of them broke it for a while, the only noise present was that of the leaves rustling in the wind. A large cloud hung ominously overhead and the wind began to pick up- a prelude to an oncoming downpour

"I know you don't like her. I know she doesn't like you," Tarah said eventually. "But she's my family."

Khan felt that pang in his chest again as soon as that word left her lips. He listened and saw a tear roll down the cheek of her partially-obscured face.

"Please…please don't take that away from me," she requested, though it sounded more like she was begging him.

In an instant, Khan sat himself down against the fence, almost beside her with only a wall of leaves and branches separating them; he turned away, the sadness and grief growing. He had not intended to cause a rift- he had merely intended to point out the obvious.

He of all people knew just what it was like to lose the ones you care about the most. He had had a family- and now they were gone.

Khan had not intended for Tarah to end up like him.

After a minute of reflection and a slight struggle to hold back tears of his own- he dearly missed his crew so and he still could not believe that all seventy two of them were now dead when he had been so close to rescuing them- he spoke, though his voice was strained by his inner-despair. "That was not my intention. Don't cry."

He still averted his gaze from her, but he continued to speak, finding himself unable to stop himself. He wanted to speak with someone- someone of his mind-set and race who would understand.

"You are…fortunate, Tarah. More than you realise. You have very little family, but it is still present, and- despite their lesser status- you are loved by them. I…"

Khan swallowed and Tarah watched him as he stared into space and straight ahead of him as the raindrops began to cascade down from the sky and on to the foliage about them.

"…I no longer possess such a family. They are…gone."

He remained that way for a minute as the rain became heavier and a few drops landed on his coat and hair and face. He almost dismissed Tarah's hand as yet another water droplet, it was so light, but it remained rested on his arm so he turned. The fair-skinned limb reached through the shrubbery and held his arm in a comforting manner, and she met his gaze with one of sympathy.

They stayed like that for a moment- in a state of calm and understanding and forgiveness- as the rain poured down.

Then he nodded, to show that he appreciated the gesture. He did not thank her with words, but she seemed to understand, removing her arm and shifting out of her little haven of natural greenery and into the open grass of the garden, slowly standing.

Together, they walked back towards the house in a state of mutual understanding, perhaps camaraderie.

And, just for a minute, Khan felt as if he was walking with more than a fellow Augment, but someone whom he could consider a crewmember.


	11. Chapter 11

There were no more arguments in Doctor Sheridan's house that day.

Once they'd gone back inside, the Doctor had spoken with Tarah, making sure that she was alright and apologising for scaring her earlier, though the girl insisted that she was fine and that she was sorry for running out the way that she did.

The Doctor had agreed to house them and hide them in her home, though she made it clear to Khan that it was for her daughter's sake and hers alone that she was doing so. As far as she was concerned, Khan was a freeloader who happened to have befriended Tarah.

Not that Khan minded. He now had what he wanted and he was content.

A mere few hours since the Augments had come inside, it was nightfall and the sky had shifted tone, from grey to black. The rain was still falling, heavy and pounding on the windows.

Khan barely heard it once he stepped into the shower. Normally, he didn't see the point in them unless there was a formal occasion to be attended or if they were necessary to blend in but Doctor Sheridan had insisted that he and Tarah take them.

"My house, my rules," she'd said firmly. "And no-one stays in my house if their personal hygiene is lacking."

He'd decided to go along with it and let the water fall down his naked body, across his muscles and skin and soak the sweat and the dirt from him. All the proof of the strenuous labour and effort he had made to get where he was now washed away and down the plughole. He wasn't happy about ridding himself of the proof of his strength but it was apparently necessary.

He washed his hair as well, using the nearest shampoo that was available.

Once he was finished having his shower, Khan dried and dressed himself with the clothes Doctor Sheridan had given him. They were roughly his size and newly purchased- probably from when she'd left the house earlier to go shopping.

Khan, now fully dressed, then walked on to the landing carrying his sodden towel. One of the three bedroom doors was left ajar and he could hear voices sounding from within the room- Doctor Sheridan's and Tarah's, specifically.

"Your hair looks nice, you know," the Doctor was saying as Tarah was clambering in to the room's single bed, donning her own new clothes. The woman sat by the side of the bed, simply talking. "It suits you."

"Really?"

"Yes. I had no idea it was wavy, you know." The woman fingered her own dark hair, straight and now loose. "I suppose you didn't inherit that from me."

"I don't think so. Do I look like you?" Tarah asked.

"In some ways, yes. In others, no. I think that the male chromosomes contained dominant alleles so you would look more like your—"

Khan cleared his throat from the hallway and the woman stopped, glancing through the partially open door at him.

"Yes?" she called wearily, rolling her eyes.

"I need to use your computer," Khan said flatly.

"Then use it. It's downstairs- I left it near the settee."

He moved towards the staircase and descended, heading back towards the house's living room and retrieving the Doctor's laptop, switching it on. He waited for it to load, sitting on the fabric furniture with his back in its usual straight posture. Eventually, the device was fully loaded and he made sure that his browsing session would not be monitored before searching what he needed to on the World Wide Web.

He wasn't happy with what he found.

The USS Enterprise and its crew had no specific current location. They were one year into a deep-space mission that would last another four years- they could be anywhere.

He growled slightly upon this discovery. He would not sit idly by for four years to exact his vengeance. It needed to be delivered swiftly- it needed a new target.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps and he glanced upwards to see Doctor Sheridan wandering in to the room, holding a steaming mug of a hot beverage. She noticed his annoyed expression and sat on the second sofa wordlessly.

"Where is Tarah?" Khan asked after a minute.

"Sleeping," was the woman's blunt response before taking a sip of her drink.

The Augment pressed the computer's off button and set it aside, staring into space darkly. He needed a new target…some Starfleet branch that he could obliterate and achieve revenge from. Khan thought awhile before addressing the woman again.

"Tell me about the Augment programme you were involved in."

She turned to him, raising an eyebrow as she swallowed some tea from her mug. She set the container down once she finished the drink and folded her thin arms. "That's classified information."

"You were dismissed."

"I was," the Doctor agreed, nodding. "And I was threatened with treason if I ever spoke with anyone about it."

"And you are going to obey them, even now?" Khan challenged, though his voice was calm.

She stared at the carpet below for a minute before responding. "I have no love for Starfleet and no qualms against the corporation itself. My grudge is with the people who ran, and still run, the Augment programme. So I won't obey them."

She adjusted her seating position, facing him. "What do you want to know?"

He paused a moment, seemingly thinking something through in his mind. "The Augments, specifically. How they were made. About Tarah."

Doctor Sheridan nodded, and then she began to talk.

"At the start, I was an average Starfleet scientist. I was stationed aboard a vessel; I was a part of a crew. I served that way for three years. Apparently, I showed promise in genetics and biological sciences- I received a promotion but I wasn't allowed to talk about it to anyone else.

"I accepted the promotion and I was shortly moved to a colony planet, where I was briefed about the project I was about to become involved in, along with thirty other scientists.

"We were told that we were about to commence work on a project that had not been looked at for three hundred years- we were going to build Augment soldiers from DNA that had been located from the Eugenics Era through advanced scientific methods. These Augment soldiers were going to be used for Starfleet in the event of an upcoming war, if there was ever going to be one, and we were going to contribute to their fertilisation and growth.

"The programme was highly classified, so much so that we daren't use the gametes needed for the fertilisation from another source. All the scientists were expected to donate the gametes themselves.

"At first, I wasn't troubled. I was…infertile, you see, so by donating an egg cell, it would be made fertile through the technology and I would technically be a mother, which was something I'd always wanted to be able to be. The DNA of a male Eugenic was inserted into the empty husk of a sperm cell and they were fertilised via in-vitro fertilisation. The process was the same for the other scientists chosen for the programme, though it varied on gender- if the doctor was a male, the egg cell would be filled with Eugenic DNA.

"Of course, it was risky, and out of the thirty embryos formed, half of them didn't make it. Mine, fortunately, survived the tests through development- the further alterations to the brain, the muscle, and the bone…that was when I started having doubts.

"After three months, the surviving Augment children were numbered with the initials of their human parent and the year of their birth and taken away for two years- I don't know where. We were updated on their progress but none of the scientists actually informed on what was happening to them and what was going on.

"I didn't see my child for another two years and I barely recognised her when I saw her again. The last time I had seen her, she was a baby in a liquid test tube, struggling to survive all the adaptations and tests they were putting her little body through, and then she reappeared as a toddler that I wasn't even sure was the same girl until I checked her DNA.

"She could speak, she was clearly intelligent for her age, but at the same time, she was so ignorant. It was clear to me she'd been indoctrinated somehow on a strict regime whilst she was being raised. As doctors, the other scientists and I were tasked with keeping close watch on their physical welfare and development as they grew. We weren't to get too emotionally attached to them.

"SH-47, Tarah…I didn't treat her the way the other doctors treated their own Augments. Some already had children, some were indifferent, but I just couldn't be that way. I could never afford to have my own children and I couldn't produce them by natural means. I saw SH-47 as a little miracle and I didn't listen to my superiors very well…

"I taught her to think, to challenge, to be curious, to question. I encouraged her to seek knowledge and develop her own identity. And I wasn't supposed to. It wasn't until she asked me to name her that I started to realise how much trouble we could both get into for that. I knew I shouldn't, that it defied her very purpose- she was designed for the battlefield, to help win wars, not to be a person.

"But, at the same time, she was alive. She wasn't an empty vessel, like the others had become. She had a…soul. So I named her, despite my concerns. And I'm still not sure whether I did the right thing.

"We were found out, somehow, and I shouldn't have been surprised. The superiors weren't happy with me- I'd apparently potentially ruined a capable soldier, one that had constantly proved itself to be a born survivor. Apparently, to them, nothing was more dangerous than an advanced soldier with a mind of its own.

"Immediately, I was discharged and sent back to earth, threatened to keep silent or I'd face further consequences. Still, even then, I hounded on them for information on her. I felt responsible for this and I wanted to know what they were doing to her.

"Eventually, I was told that she was back on the programme and recovering from my _poisonous influence_. I didn't trust all of what they said so I hacked into their databases and searched her reference number.

"When I saw what they'd done, I felt absolutely sickened. Apparently, she'd gone through continuous shock therapy so that she would respond to her number again and forget her name. They'd electrocuted her into submission. A five-year-old girl. If they were terrible enough to do that, I daren't think what they were teaching them about warfare.

"Ever since, I used to keep hacking their systems to monitor her progress, make sure that she was alright. And then one day I looked and she was scheduled for termination."

The Doctor finished her tale and stared into space, her expression melancholy. She didn't say another word.

Khan did nothing for a while, but eventually he stood and passed out of the room with a grateful nod.

"Wait."

He glanced back at the woman from the doorway.

"You're an Augment as well, aren't you?" she asked.

"I am."

"Then, if it's alright, I'd like a blood sample."

The man raised an eyebrow and looked her in the eyes. He'd already had blood taken from him countless times. What did she want it for?

"I'd like to analyse and compare your genetics with Tarah's- see how you're the same, how you're different. Just out of curiosity."

Khan mulled it over for a second before cautiously agreeing.

The Doctor stood and headed into another room, probably her lab or study where she kept her technology. He followed, but his mind was not focused on the blood test.

In his mind, he was already forming his attack plan on this new target.


	12. Chapter 12

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Gosh, it's been a while. Sorry, I got writer's block for a while, so it took longer than expected to write this chapter. Hopefully, you all enjoy it. Sorry for making you all wait.**

**Please review- tell me what you liked, didn't like, your thoughts, and enjoy chapter 12.**

For a time, the house contained the three individuals alone. For weeks, the two Augments remained in hiding in the Doctor's house, under the little protection she could provide.

Surprisingly, no-one had found them yet. Unlike every other time they had previously relocated, Starfleet were no longer breathing down their necks.

Only once did Starfleet come knocking on Doctor Sheridan's door. Khan had wondered how she would respond to this- would she panic? Would she hand them over?

She'd ushered them upstairs and invited the two investigators inside, quickly denying seeing the two Augments or hearing of them and going on to excitedly explain a break in her biological experiments- the creation of a new plant that could give out the oxygen levels of ten trees.

They'd left rather quickly after that, whether that was her intention or not, leaving the older Augment somewhat impressed.

For Tarah's benefit, she was lent an encyclopaedia to brush up on her general knowledge and blend in more easily. Much of her time was initially spent holed up in a quiet area of the house with the large book, which fascinated her in itself, having never come across a physical book before. She treated it like a holy relic, taking great care not to scuff the edges, bend the spine, or fold or crease the pages.

She would scan through it over and over, committing the information to her memory and enveloping herself within this knowledge. Finally, concepts such as culture and history and science and sport began to make sense.

She had finally discovered a hidden part of herself, in a manner.

Language particularly interested her. She once came across a German dictionary and took to memorising all the terms and nouns within in an attempt to learn the language. She emerged from a guest room later and, upon coming across Khan (who was going through illegally-obtained documents on the Augment programme he had acquired from Doctor Sheridan at the time), the girl decided to test her new linguistics, talking to him in this foreign language.

He'd been surprised with the fluent accent as it awkwardly pronounced the words and the broken sentences and incorrect connectives- along with the fact that she was speaking it at all- but let her talk for a while whilst staying silent.

Once she'd said her piece, Tarah waited expectantly for a response. After a minute, he lifted his eyes from the papers to her and spoke her in perfect German on improvements and, upon seeing her before proud expression start to vanish with each criticism, he finally added an emotionless, "Gut gemacht."

Still, she'd not picked up any foreign language dictionaries since.

Khan spent his time hidden away finding out about the Augment programme. They had found Augment DNA from the Eugenics era, Khan had been told. That was his time. How had they gotten a hold of it?

And, more troubling, was what this branch of Starfleet were creating and raising Augment soldiers for. Did they have a war in mind, like Admiral Marcus did with the Klingons? Or was it simply a reserve?

Either way, it didn't sit right with him. And he had a vendetta.

His target had shifted from the Enterprise, for now, to the Augment colony.

He needed to prepare. He needed to know what he was up against, who his targets were, how to get there and how to fight them.

So he spent his time going over what information he could through hacking their files (though he had to do so quickly and sparingly to avoid being found out and tracked) and investigating Doctor Sheridan's few documents, which she had managed to smuggle away with her when she had been discharged, and used them in an attempt to find answers to his questions.

The documents consisted of a rough plan of the colony base, a list of the scientists that had once been her peers and a few other reports and items that might prove useful. There was a lot of missing information that he required but he took to asking Doctor Sheridan and Tarah.

Unfortunately, the Doctor had left the house a day before on one of her research projects, to a lab that she had rented for sponsored research, which served as her income. She'd left instructions and told them to lock up, to not make much noise and to pretend that no-one was home.

"You two never leave the house. No-one will know," she had said. Then she pointed out the instructions to the two, Khan calmly taking it all in whilst Tarah worried. Some of her grim predictions to prevent her leaving them were suggestions involving Starfleet, Klingons, a meteorite and half-a-dozen energetic tribbles. Still, her mother would not be deterred and she left regardless with a peck on her daughter's forehead and a look at Khan which read _I trust you with her so don't you mess this up_.

And so, when he was sat at the table and examining the documents and consulting his tablet, he needed information on what occupations the Augments were designed to uphold. He signalled the girl over, who obediently did so, setting down her encyclopaedia book and rising from the settee. He asked her his question and she thought a moment.

"Scouts, snipers, operators, engineers, mechanics, guards, pilots…" she listed, then stopped. "That's all I know of."

"No others?"

"I overheard someone talking to the Commodore about intelligence agents once. They might have acted on it, they might have not."

Khan frowned. The Commodore's name kept cropping up in much of the material he had access to, but he knew so little about him. "Who is the Commodore?"

A startled look appeared on her pale face and then it fell and she didn't respond, her eyes downcast at her lap. She seemed disturbed by his question.

"Tarah, answer me."

In silence, she stood, and her chair raked across the floor with a brief shriek as she turned tail and moved to the stairs.

It was the first time she had outright disobeyed him.

He did not pursue her, though he deeply wanted to. Instead, he watched her abruptly leave until she was up the stairs and out of sight.

Khan sighed and his gaze roved back to the document, picking up a photocopied letter that had been signed off by this Commodore. His eyes bored deeply into the typing, as if he could literally read between the letters and the lines and find what he was looking for.

What was it about this name that struck the girl into such a strong silence? Who were they?

Maria Sheridan let out a deep sigh as she closed the lab door, relieved to be back in her own environment once more.

The strong scent of cleanliness- disinfectant- stung her nose lovingly and the whiteness of the surfaces blinded her as the sun reflected from the smooth surface, light falling from the ceiling-window above.

Science was her passion, it could not be denied. It was powerful, it could perform what people deemed to be miracles and it strove to improve itself constantly.

Science was the search for improvement, but never for perfection. Utopia meant its downfall and the end of its existence. Fortunately, she had not yet come across perfection in her field of work, so the possibilities of the future were limitless.

The closest she had come to perfection was her daughter. And she saw nothing that science could improve about her. She was a human being though her capabilities had been advanced to well beyond the human level. She was superhuman.

But Doctor Sheridan valued her person, her mind, the most. It was still developing and breaking free from the hold Starfleet was trying to maintain with a fierce grip, and she wore her name with pride. Despite the fact that Tarah chose to remain with Khan, who was a constant threat to her safety and well-being, she was proud of her daughter.

And she was happy to have her back in her life, for however long that was going to be.

Alas, her work called her away from her child and to her research and its contribution to her mortgage. She could only hope that the two didn't burn her house down whilst she was here. She would be gone for a week, so there was a chance that it was possible.

Tying her long dark hair back into a long, trailing ponytail that fell down her back, she went to check up on her new plant, which was stable and producing the levels of oxygen that she had hypothesised it would, as the graph on the screen of its case was showing. She gave it more water and placed it on in a sunny spot in the middle of the room.

Her eyes scanned the room as she went to quickly print the graph out and send it and a few sampled of its leaves to her sponsor, lingering for a moment on the DNA scanner.

Subconsciously, her fingertips rested on her lab coat pocket, wherein the tube containing Khan's blood sample rested.

Well, it would take the equipment some time to print out the results. She might as well examine the sample now, while she had a moment, before she could be burdened with more research requests.

Five minutes later, his genetic code was displayed onscreen. The double helix and all of its genetic coding rested before her and she examined it, noting what attributes it displayed for her to see. She had already checked its salinity, the level of red and white blood cells and its blood sugar, which was a steady and healthy level.

A bleep sounded from the equipment and she lost her train of thought. A few blood samples had been stored on the device before, sometimes that of terminally ill persons who she had been asked to create specific medication for or the occasional test subject (such as the tribble she had once studied), other times of herself and of Tarah. The bleep sounding indicated a genetic matchup in some way- a helpful programme she had installed to look for correlations within samples.

Absentmindedly, she selected _CONFIRM GENETIC MATCH_ and another double helix came up on the screen, which had now become a split-screen so as to directly compare the codes.

Her eyes slowly widened the more she examined it, constantly flicking from one code to the other.

There was not merely one off-chance genetic match. The entire screen was filled with links between the two samples of DNA, almost as if they were of the same…

She shook her head and refreshed the equipment, wondering if there was a glitch, but the results remained the same.

Her heart began to pound.

The glass tube that contained his blood hit the solid floor and shattered into a thousand fragments.


	13. Chapter 13

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here's the next chapter. This was a real thrill to write, though I do have to warn you all that it contains a touchy subject. If any of you are affected by it, please message me and let out all of your worries. I do not mean to offend anyone if I do so. The next chapter will help to explain certain aspects of this one.**

**Please review and tell me what you liked and what could have been done better so I can make improvements and amendments, if necessary.**

**Here's chapter 13.**

After Tarah's non-compliance, a game of cat and mouse began in the house. Khan- the cat, the predator that had his sights on something that he would not leave be. Tarah- the mouse, who would take to skittering away and hiding herself away every time they crossed paths.

It officially started in the kitchen the following day, when Tarah had woken and gone down for food- specifically breakfast- to find him already there. His gaze rested from his toast to her, like a bear would regard a deer that had stumbled into its path.

Quickly, she had seized a satsuma and dashed back upstairs before he could ask that question again.

He hadn't followed her but he seemed to try and run into her whenever he could, to get the opportunity to ask her. He was biding his time, stalking her movements until the opportune moment, a chance to pounce.

Perhaps she was exaggerating. Perhaps she was working herself up over the whole affair. She was making him sound more animal than man, which he clearly wasn't- he was merely determined. Doggedly, if she wanted to compare him to a degenerate form, not a preying tiger she had initially thought him to be.

It was odd, looking back. She had been honest with him since their meeting, obedient and helpful in any way she could be. And now, here she was, fleeing every time they came across one another for fear of revealing just one secret, one shame.

But it was a secret shame that she wanted to keep to herself. When Doctor Sheridan returned, he could ask her. Until then, she wouldn't answer. She had paid him her due with her only familial bond and the shelter it provided for them both.

She would have told him anything, just not that.

A white sunbeam shimmered down through a gap in the beige coloured curtains, greyed by the darkness outside of the window. The walls, normally cream, were also stripped of their soothing tone.

The occasional picture hanging off the wall cast small shadows about, the moon's eye glinting off of a few so that they leered at her in her bed. Of course she knew that that was all they were- pictures- but it reflected her insecurities all the same. The lights reminded her of the LED lights that gave away hidden cameras.

Uncomfortably and restlessly, she shifted under the layers of quilt and blanket. She daren't use the new electric one- she feared it setting alight the bedclothes and her along with them. The numbers of bedding reflected the weather outside. Winter was ploughing through the autumn leaves and left a chilled breath lingering about the house most mornings.

She cold didn't bother her too much- her body was adapted to survive in all kinds of environments and temperatures. Still, her mother seemed to either forget or ignore that fact and she did not complain or correct her.

Tarah rested under them, and they covered her like the thickness of a dream. She did dream. She had always been capable of that.

Sometimes they were confusing. Other times they frightened her. Those dreams- or rather nightmares- made her wake in cold sweats and she had to force herself to calm down before even thinking of returning to her slumber.

But, that night, sleep couldn't claim her and surround her with dreams like her blanket. Tarah lay awake, tossing and turning on the mattress, prodding the wallpaper with her index finger as she faced the wall. The moon's gleam rested in the middle of the room, on the cool wooden-lino flooring like a rippling puddle.

At some point, the wooden door opened with a soft creak on its hinges. She always shut her door when going to sleep, so that the creaking would wake her and she would be alert to any intruder to step foot inside. It served its purpose and she kept her back to door, on the other side of the room, and stared at the wall.

She knew who it was. Their scent gave them away- she was too used to it.

There issued a padding of bare feet upon the insincere floor, lying it was wood, and she imagined the small pool of moon water being disturbed by a foot as her unexpected night-time visitor made their way across the room.

Eventually, the muffled footsteps stopped and she felt pressure adjacent to her on the mattress as the material began to give way. Someone sat down on the edge of the bed, beside her, and she still didn't move.

Quietly, a man's deep voice said, "You can't sleep."

For a minute, she let the words linger in the air she faintly breathed. "No," was her eventual answer.

Finally, she turned and heaved herself into a sitting position, tugging at a loose strand of dark curl that came down between her eyes and flicking it back (her hair was a constant mess that would not keep tidy, not that she made much of an effort to make it so. Doctor Sheridan was locked in mortal combat with the bird's nest every time she drew her comb- it fought back with an impenetrable barricade of fibres and her mother would angrily retreat when the brush's attacks proved to be futile) so that she could clearly see. Her back rested against the brass headboard and she met his gaze.

His hair was not gelled and loose strands played out on one side of his head. His nightclothes were a plain fabric t-shirt (probably pale blue in the right lighting) and fabric trousers that hung loosely against his muscled frame. A pair of blue eyes regarded her calmly.

"Is something the matter?" he inquired, leaning back against the cool metal frame himself, his legs resting atop the throw over.

"No." She ran a hand through the dark mass of her curls, which were now growing down the back of her neck and reaching for her shoulder blades. Then she changed her mind. "Yes. I don't know."

Khan raised an eyebrow at her through the darkness. "You're unsure."

She nodded.

"Is the fault mine?"

The girl blinked at her companion in disbelief. His expression was solemn, set in stone. She had never heard him say such things before and he sounded almost guilty. It unnerved her.

"What?" was all she could whisper in response.

"Am I troubling you?" he asked simply.

She shook her head.

"You do not need to lie. I must know. Am I troubling you? Are you frightened of me?"

Khan looked at her with a kind of saddened resignation. She was not sure exactly what had brought out this side of him but she was not used to seeing him without his emotionless face, frown or scowl.

But he wanted to know. Was she afraid of him? She restrained herself from answering for a short while, thinking of what to say. To be honest, she wasn't sure of the right answer. Sometimes she admired his strength. Sometimes it terrified her. Like when he had initially held her hostage and turned his rage on her after the fight with the Starfleet investigator.

Eventually, a weary sigh escaped her small lips. "At first," she admitted. "You frightened me…"

"When did you cease to be so afraid, then?"

She did not answer. There were other instances that were more recent when he had scared her, like her reunion with Doctor Sheridan.

He took her silence as a negative response. _I do still frighten you_, she imagined him thinking.

She kept her gaze focused on the moon puddle, how it shone in the darkness, and out of Khan's saddened eyes, where the moon was also illuminated in a pale blue hue. It saddened her to sense his realisation, his sad acceptance, of this fact. If he cared at all. But, then again, he would not be with her currently if the notion had not been worrying him to some degree.

The distant bark of a fox broke the awkward silence from beyond the window and into the night, piercing the distanced and isolated haze they were in from outside.

"I do not want to frighten you," he said finally. "You must understand that I want no harm to come to you. I merely wanted the answer to a question. That was all. If I intimidated you then…"

She glanced up at him curiously, wondering what was coming.

"…then I apologise."

Hell had frozen over. Heaven was grounded; it felt that big of a deal. She had never imagined Khan apologising for anything since she met him yet here he was, doing just that.

The man's face was set in a softened expression and regarding her calmly.

She shook her head. "Don't…" was all she said. She didn't want him to apologise. She wanted the Commodore dead. And she couldn't tell him why without telling him her shame.

He cocked an eyebrow. "Are you alright?" he asked her.

She bit her bottom lip. "No."

"What's troubling you?"

She let out a strained sigh before letting all of her inner thoughts spill out of her mouth. "You want to know about the Commodore and I want to tell you, but I can't. It's humiliating."

His pale face frowned slightly, not in anger, but in concern. "Humiliating?"

"Yes…"

"Did they do something to you?"

She fell silent once more.

"Tarah, what did they do?"

The girl lifted her head and met his gaze with pained blue eyes. "If I tell you, please don't think any less of me than you already do."

"I do not think badly of you. Now tell me."

"But please don't be ashamed of me," she begged him.

He stared down at Tarah, who was now pleading, half-consumed by her bedcovers. "I will not be ashamed of you," he said.

She inhaled the night air of her room deeply after she had turned to look at the foot of her bed, steeling her courage. Her voice, when it came out, came broken. "His name is Commodore Jonathon Wilson. He electrocuted me for having a name. He had me stripped of my fertility for being of `bad stock`. He humiliated me by having my comrades attack me when I disobeyed an order and ordered my execution."

And then she bit back a sob, curling her legs and burying her head into her knees.

Initially, Khan said nothing, but his light eyes were wide. He knew about the electrocution. But not about the other two crimes that had been committed against her. "Your…fertility?" he breathed.

"Last year, I was pulled out of training by him- he said I was `born from the blood of a poisonous man` or something of the like and then I went through some kind of operation and when I woke up, I was told that I wouldn't be able to have children."

She sniffed again. When she lifted her head, a tear fell, careering down her pale cheek and splashing down on to the bed clothes. "It didn't matter to me until we came here…when I found out about families in the encyclopaedia and was with Doctor Sheridan again. Besides her, I _cannot_ have one, ever, even if I did meet someone. Now I know what it's like, I know what I've lost…"

Her blurred eyes made out his white fist, clenched against his leg, the veins standing out. His expression had transformed entirely. Before it had been concerned, now it was filled with anger and silent rage. His eyes were now blue discs of burning fire.

It startled her. She understood why she was upset, but why was he?

"Khan?" she whispered, her voice blending into the tension.

He turned to her slowly, as if it had dragged him back to the present. He did not say a word and released his hand. She blinked as his arms enveloped her and pulled her close, against the fabric of his t-shirt.

Her moist lashes flickered and she realised that he was hugging her. Only Doctor Sheridan had ever hugged her before now, yet now the coldest, most intimidating person she had ever met was cuddling her as she silently cried. It was surreal.

She murmured his name again and Khan glanced down into her tearful eyes. "You are no less than you were before. You are not poisonous, nor were you born so or came into being by a toxin. You have been wronged and it is not you who should cry."

But she felt that she was less. A line of future generations had been wiped away. Her legacy ended with her and that was that. She clung to him tighter, burying her tears into his pyjama top.

And he held her close, not speaking, not pushing her away. This was a new experience for him, and she was now under his charge. He was responsible for her- he had to act that way.

His thoughts lingered on the communication call he had had with Doctor Sheridan earlier that day and what he had been told. He had learned something he at first could not believe. The day was full of discoveries, not all of them pleasant.

Now he knew something else.

That Commodore Wilson was going to die.


	14. Chapter 14

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: So it took me a while to** **plan out and write this chapter. I wanted to try and do it right, keep it intriguing and such, if possible. There's a rough outline of Into Darkness from his perspective in here, and a revelation, if you've not already spotted it.**

**Please feel free to review- criticism and comments are appreciated. Let me know what to improve, please. Other than that, enjoy the chapter.**

Khan had slept with many women in his life, majorly during his days as a ruler during the Eugenics era. He liked to consider his body a temple, spiritual and physical goodness flowing through him, so Khan never once doubted that his bed partners were more than satisfied.

None of those pleasurable nights, where they were tangled- locked in primal embrace- underneath the hot and sticky bed covers and cries of pleasure would echo and drift around the halls of his quarters, had a child ever been sired. Precaution had always been taken. Khan had never intended to have a child unless he married, which he sincerely doubted he would ever do. At the time, he had many partners that came and went with the passing of the days, months and seasons. Why resign himself to just one for the rest of this days?

So Khan remained that way until the wars and their aftermath, when he and his followers- his crew- had taken flight on the Botany Bay and slept for three hundred years.

He had never been a father. Perhaps that was why he wasn't sure what to do when Doctor Sheridan contacted him through his tablet, the day before his and Tarah's conciliation, and showed him the results of his blood sample and an apparent genetic match.

A very close genetic match.

With his crew, his family gone, Khan had gotten to know true loneliness. He felt that he had nothing to fight for but their memories, forcing himself to believe that that was enough and that they deserved to be avenged.

But if he succeeded, what then? Would he be condemned to live the remainder of his days on the run in a world he barely understood, alone? Would he just end it all and hoped that his spirit would soak into the sky and that they would be reunited once more?

What if he failed?

He would be alone, no matter the outcome turned out to be.

Then he had met Tarah and, though those worries and fears never went away, he did not feel the pang of loneliness so harshly and heavily in his chest. She was not family, she was not crew, but she was of his race and she was not an enemy.

As time passed, she'd even grown to be a companion or friend of sorts.

Just two words warped his concept completely that day as they left Doctor Sheridan's lips. Her face was not thrilled, not excited. No, it was almost sad. Looking back afterwards, he was surprised she had told him at all. She had nothing to gain from it. No, all she would get out of telling him were potential losses. She would lose a treasure, a star in her darkening skies, to him.

He admired her for her strength in telling what she did. Perhaps, in another time and place, they might have been close. Previously, she clearly held no love for him; her disgust at his actions in San Francisco and London filled her core as far as he was concerned. If she had felt the same presently, she would not have shared news of her discovery. She would have most likely kept it to herself.

What had changed?

Still, the news had shocked him and he immediately had to sit down, he was so surprised. At first, he didn't even believe her. But the more she spoke and explained, the more things began to make sense. She even showed him the different double helixes through the glass screen for him to see. Eventually, he didn't even doubt that it was the truth. Sudden concepts  
came into his mind to support her theory- there was no contradictory evidence.

Finally, the contact session was ended and he sat in silence at the table with the table set atop among numerous illegally-obtained Starfleet documents. But his mind was not on Starfleet, for once. It was on family.

It was on his newly-discovered child.

The morning after the two Augments had spoken, forgiven and forgotten, Khan was filled with numerous emotions.

Nervousness. Concern. Rage.

He dressed early, as was his fashion, ate alone and in silence whilst the house's only other current occupant showered herself and changed, having slept in longer, tired from last night's tears.

For a while, he'd hugged her that night, calming her down with his presence and embrace, before she eventually ceased crying and went back to sleep. Once she'd drifted off, he'd left wordlessly and silently, returning to his own room.

When she did come down, he was still sat there, back rigid in the glass and steel chair as he stared into space, a mug of tepid hot tea steaming into the air and into his line of sight steadily.

She reached for a glass in the cabinet to fill with a morning beverage before planning to join him but he spoke as her fingers brushed the cool, smooth material.

"Tarah."

She turned her head a fraction, right eyebrow raised.

"Sit down," he said, his chin resting on a fist connected to an arm and an elbow which stood on the table. His tone wasn't particularly firm or commanding- it sounded more like a request.

So she did, abandoning her glass for the time being and seating herself on a spare chair at the table, joining him. "Yes?" she asked, a hint of concern audible in her voice. She wondered if this was about last night. She wasn't quite sure whether she felt like bringing up the issue again.

His fingers were now knitted together underneath his chin and his pale blue eyes regarded stared into hers. "I want to tell you who I am," he said.

"I know who you are," Tarah replied calmly.

"No, you don't. The man you have been told about by your mother is John Harrison. I want to tell you about my life prior to my alias' creation."

She said nothing further, seemingly realising that he was taking the whole affair rather seriously. So she merely sat and listened.

With her undivided attention now upon him, Khan commenced his story.

He told her about his creation- that he was the product of a selective breeding and genetic engineering program designed to improve humanity. He told her that he had once controlled more than one-quarter of Earth's population, ruling in Asia and the Middle East.

He told her about the Eugenics Wars, how he and a band of followers fled from Earth and slumbered in cryogenic sleep for near three hundred years. And he told her about Marcus.

"I was awoken by him, and awoken alone. He threatened my crew with death unless I submitted to his demands, that I design weaponry and star ships that were built for war," he practically spat, his anger burning within. Then she appeared uncomfortable, but he did not stop.

He went on to explain how Marcus never awoke the rest of his crew, no matter how much Khan had worked or pleaded, and was thus forced to smuggle them to safety in his own creations. He told her how this ultimately failed and that he had to escape, believing them dead, sparking his initial campaign against Starfleet, starting with the bombing of London, and then attacking a response conference at Starfleet Headquarters, killing the majority of its most influential figures.

Khan recalled fleeing to Kronos, being threatened with the familiar-sounding torpedoes by a Starfleet vessel and saving the landing party mentioned from the hostile Klingons to confirm his suspicions and then surrendered.

Then Marcus pursued, attacked their vessel as he brought to light his situation to the ship's captain, Kirk. They boarded the enemy ship, once the weapons were disabled from the inside. Kirk aimed to arrest Marcus. Khan aimed to exact vengeance. Ultimately, Khan's ambitions were fulfilled and he was left to barter with the Enterprise for the return of his crew with his own hostages, Kirk included.

He had finally gotten them back. He himself beamed the torpedoes upon his ship and felt that his ordeal was finally over.

Then the torpedoes had exploded with his crew inside, sending him crashing to Earth. He was arrested, placed back in cryogenic sleep.

From there, the next year or so was blank. He had awoken due to his cryo tube malfunctioning during space transportation. Fuelled with grief and rage, he commenced an escape, stealing a shuttle and then crashing into that asteroid field, stranded on a foreign world with not enough time to repair the shuttle before what little resources Khan possessed ran out.

"And that's where I come in?" Tarah questioned once he finished talking.

"That is correct," he confirmed with finality, his story spoken and his urge to explain sated.

She'd listened to the whole of it, and she wasn't sure what to quite think. Part of her was angry at him, for some reason, probably for the devastation caused to people not involved in his campaign. Another greater part of her felt that his actions were mostly, if not completely, justified.

Would she have done the same, in his shoes?

As the man took a sip of his cooled mug of tea, she asked, "Why have you told me all of this?"

He closed his eyes and moved the mug from his lips, setting it down upon a coaster situated upon the table. "For many reasons," was his reply. "I am aware that I will be remembered for my deeds poorly, that history has made me out to be the villain. I want you to understand me, to not judge me the same way based on what else you have heard. Think what you will, but only another few living beings know my story, and they are no friends to me. Perhaps I wished to amend that, by telling a friend."

The chair leg squeaked across the floor as he stood. "Also, I want you to know that you are not alone- Starfleet has stripped us both of our families- the ones from my past, the ones from your future."

She fidgeted uncomfortably, glancing down at her knees.

"They are not as innocent and justified as they are made out to be. Lastly…"

A hand squeezed a skinny shoulder blade. "…I trust you with this information. I have told you my story, my soul. You deserve to know it. You are…special...to me. More than you realise."

She gave him a quizzical glance, not quite sure what his reasoning was for the sudden compliment.

As he set his mug on the kitchen counter and left. She watched him go, resolving to once more scour her encyclopaedia for the different kinds of relationships and where the two now stood in relation to them, now unsure they were just friends any more.

But what Tarah was ignorant to, Khan knew. He made his way upstairs, Doctor Sheridan's voice echoing in his mind from yesterday's revelation. Just two words. Just two words had changed their relationship- to him, anyway- completely. He closed his eyes and they reverberated within his mind.

_She's yours_.


End file.
